My opinion differs here. First, the free philosophy is nice for me as a user: for instance say I buy a Marshall "smart" speaker, for which the software kind of sucks and is essentially not maintained (but still it connects to the internet...). I don't see how it would hurt Marshall to enable an open source ROM. After all, they sell the hardware, right? And a big part of the software running on that speaker is open source; they did not pay anything for it, and more often than not, they "forget" attribution for permissive code.

But companies try to minimize their costs, and contributing a bugfix back upstream is seen as a cost (conveniently ignoring that they did not pay for the software in the first place). With a copyleft license, of course the company can keep ignoring the license (like they do for attribution in permissive licenses), but at least it gives the developer an argument for contributing back upstream.

And it doesn't have to be GPL. LGPL and MPL are easy to handle.

> I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.

If the software has value, I am convinced that they can deal with copyleft (see Linux). And if the majority of open source software was copyleft, then companies would be used to it. Copyleft is really not that bad, it is just perceived as a source of cost by companies.