Incorrect, you've mistakenly conflated "in practice the rights are the rights of the original developer" with what the GPL aims to ensure, which is "in practice

Incorrect, you've mistakenly conflated "in practice the rights are the rights of the original developer" with what the GPL aims to ensure, which is "in practice the rights are the rights of any developer". A user (which could be a user or an entire organization) need not possess any development skills themselves in order to hire somebody else with developer skills. I don't have a moral problem with proprietary software and think it has strengths, but the part of the core value of open source (or even simple available source, given the appropriate contractual terms[1]) could be defined as "potential for interchangeability" with respects to devs. If the original devs go in a direction that isn't desirable or for that matter got hit by a bus, there is at least the option for an individual, organization, or community sufficiently dependent or seeing sufficient value to take up the torch. Whether they have the skills directly to do it themselves is as irrelevant as whether they have the skills to maintain hardware or do building engineering or construction or whatever themselves. The ability to have a flexible and redundant market around maintaining foundational infrastructure and tooling isn't without value. 1. I personally think available source, even if only escrowed, should be flat out requirement for copyright period but that's a different discussion.