It's sad, people have really been shitting on copyleft licenses the past few years, when they are critical to ensuring our computing freedoms are preserved.

Copyleft protects the user. The friction is, like you said, by design. It ensures that something that started free, stays free, and can't be rug pulled out from under you.

Big monied interests have been trying, and succeeding, in changing the discourse around free software away from free and to simply just "open source" and moving toward permissive licenses, specifically so community effort can be extracted and monetized without contributing back.