> licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity

Subjective. Sure if you are talking about percent of market share, but it's a huge market, you don't need to capture even 1% of users to have a viable business.

The vast majority of the GNU ecosystem is GPL. Bash, git, Apache, Gimp, Blender, Libreoffice.

There are also a lot of projects that are dual licensed, allowing commercial software to be charged a fee and non-commercial software to use for free with GPL.