When you rent a hotel room you get permission to enter and sleep there, but are also restricted to not destroy the room. However the restriction already existed before you paid, so the change between the owner and you only exist in added permission. No one is allowed to destroy property of someone else so those restrictions are not additional part of the transaction.

GPL do not add restrictions. It is purely permissions given over what already exist. In theory one could rewrite the GPL license text to be lines of "I grant you permission to do X", and it would still have the same effect.

When you use the word restrictive without any other context to describe copyleft licenses, as you just have, it only serves to intentionally make the license look bad/unappealing, which is disingenuous at best. It's only restrictive in the sense that it restricts others from profiting off the hard work of the author without having to contribute anything back in return. For the author, the word restrictive is about the last thing I'd call it.

All I hear when I see people describing copyleft licenses as restrictive or viral is self-entitled whining that people can't do what they want with other people's work.

Edit: To be clear, I think the parent made their point in good faith and this is not meant as an attack on them.

The preferred term nowadays is "protective". You are given some constraints, but those are intended to protect the ability of people to keep using software from the project in the long term for any purpose.

If the net effect is to increase the overall freedom that people have for using the project, that is not necessarily more restrictive, other than in a local way. Metaphorically speaking, being able to sell yourself into slavery is not something that increases your freedom, and forbidding it isn't "more restrictive".

The GPL protects freedoms of users by placing restrictions on those that would do harm---developers (by ensuring that the code remains free) and distributors (by ensuring that the user has access to the source code).

If someone is hostile to restrictions on those two groups, then copyleft is undesirable, at the expense of the user, who has fewer guarantees of freedom.

GPL offers protections for the users, so it prevents developers restricting the users freedom, GPL prevents restricting users so ONLY developers that want to restrict users freedom feel restricted. It is like in society where your freedoms are limited to prevent removing the freedom from others, like you are not free to kill people because you teke the freedom to live from them. So killing is illegal is protecting freedom not removing freedom.

It's it less restrictive in some ways, and more restrictive in others.