Indeed, copyleft can be politically scary. Especially when for-profit companies co-opt copyleft to drive licensing revenue by selling alternative license arrangements [1]. If all those who adopt copyleft licenses pledged to commitment to community-oriented GPL enforcement principles [2] I think that it would be a lot less scary. Unfortunately we've seen "copyleft trolls" that try to wield copyleft as a weapon, either for profit or to make other demands that are not helpful to the community.

Copyleft licenses are, indeed, protective licenses from my perspective. Or, they should be.

An aside, when it comes to "Amazon pulling the rug" -- what exact incident are you referring to?

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

[2] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...