I don't think that it's solely the fault of anti-GPL people. GPL proclaims freedom but then demands you to limit your freedom when it comes to anything of your own that just happens to include GPL licensed elements. At that point, proprietary solutions whose providers couldn't care less as long as you pay your fee don't seem that bad in comparison to, say, a competitor who's going to exploit the GPL freedoms to gain an advantage. I mean, considering that the topic is about Microsoft (in a way), don't forget about the existence of the "Source available" license, though IMO the best license is always going to be the one that fits the product rather than ideology (and GPL puts the product in the background).

Public Domain is a great way of releasing intellectual property for everyone to use.

Trying to use GPL software makes you a target with angry techies constantly accusing you of not publishing complete diffs of changes needed to ship features. GPL fanatics are the most to blame for putting negative pressure on GPL. That is why Macs have wget instead of curl. GPL does not necessarily mean poison, but that is what it has become.