"scary" from a different perspective is "functional". Many companies also push back against even GPLv2 in anything other than the Linux kernel, and as a result, more people use permissive licenses, even when those permissive licenses run counter to their goals. I've directly seen corporate decision-makers ask "how can we prevent our competitors from using this to compete with us" and yet still choose permissive licensing rather than copyleft, for no obvious or stated reason. That's leaving aside many individual projects using permissive licensing; I wonder how many people doing so specifically want permissive licensing for a concrete reason, and how many just aren't sure and so they pick what seems more prevalent/"acceptable"?
In many contexts, GPL of any flavor is "that thing that the Linux kernel and a few bits of low-level Linux userspace use, and everything else avoids". GPLv3 didn't cause that; widespread corporate pushback against copyleft caused that.