Yes, although any GPL program in the BSD land cannot grant the same freedoms than BSD programs and will have to be filtered out for some use cases, which weakens the point of the BSD distributions a bit. That's not only the kernel, it's also userspace tools.
> It's more the GNU crowd making this a huge thing, the BSD approach is more like "do whatever you want"
I don't believe this to be the case. Some people in the BSD world are adamant that their code should not be contaminated by the GPL for instance because suddenly, they could not grant the rights to their users to take the code and put it into a proprietary product.
Some people in the BSD world have a strong opinion on how permissive licenses are the right way to do open source / free software.
> the GNU crowd making this a huge thing
I believe this to be a huge thing though. It is a huge thing. You should care what people can and cannot do with your code. Maybe you care that people can do "whatever you want" with your code. I think it's worth stopping and thinking about this stuff and the consequences for a moment, at least once. The world is very little "don't care, whatever", things have consequences and maybe you care about some of them. Surely you deeply care about some things? (of course there's no bad answer, you can answer no)
I myself think the GPL is the better option in most cases, because I care that the end users' freedom is guaranteed. I pretty much don't want developers to do "whatever they want" with my work, I want them to respect their own users' freedom. This is highly political/philosophical of course.
(there are exceptions, for example for codecs you might want the code to be as permissive as possible so the free codec itself is spread and is not replaced with a proprietary one for instance)