If this was BSL I agree with you, but that is not the case.
AGPL is about as open source as it gets. It is forced open source.
I recommend AGPL to any of my clients open sourcing anything in a competitive environment these days. Free for the public, but greedy corpos that do not want to share changes and be part of the community are forced to pay to support the developers that are.
This AGPL working as designed, and is certainly FLOSS.
I mean I dislike CLAs personally, but I understand why they can be healthy for a project growth.
The last time I saw a FSF CLA, it was part of a larger agreement that also imposed obligations on the FSF.
In the long run, there may be risks to the FSF holding so many copyrights. But I don't think it clarifies matters to treat the FSF's CLAs the same as ones used by a "open core" VC funded startup.
Especially when the for-profit company openly announces this assignment of rights is for the purpose of selling code you wrote to others without giving back to the authors.
The FSF doesn't have a track record of asking for CLAs, and then selling your code to others under different licenses and pocketing the profits.
These two things are being conflated in this discussion. One thing is a CLA and copyright/license changes. The other is the license itself.
Source: My PR was merged in 2021, the changes are still part of Synapse, and I never signed any CLA. I don't think they'd be able to get enough sign-offs from historical contributors to pull off any actual shenanigans with the Synapse license.
Nothing is stopping anyone from setting up a competing service and charging for it. The only thing they can't do is provide their _modified_ version as a service without providing the source code. Which is just the GPL's usual distribution clause updated for how modern software is distributed. Bear in mind that said source code could literally be a zip file that is emailed when someone requests; there's no requirement to post it publicly on an ongoing basis.
I don't consider myself a FSF zealot; far from it in fact. Most of my software to date has been permissively licensed. The difference in this particular case is I'm not just building a tool or a library, I'm building out a complete product and putting a LOT of my hard-earned time and energy into it. Enough that I want to actually put in writing that any modifications should also be open-sourced.