And that's not what I mean. I understand the linking issue. What I'm saying is that the GPL does not force or require someone to
relicense their code. Their code is theirs. They only have to license the distribution as a whole with the GPL to be GPL compliant.
You can look at any Linux (or BSD) distribution for hundreds of examples of BSD/MIT code linked to GPL code. The BSD/MIT code packages are not "relicensed" as GPL, but the Linux distribution, as a whole, is distributed as GPL.