It's a bit fatuous to assign blame to a license agreement. You can assign blame to people that choose license agreements. In this case, that's the VLC develop

It's a bit fatuous to assign blame to a license agreement. You can assign blame to people that choose license agreements. In this case, that's the VLC developers for choosing the GPL, and Apple for choosing the App Store restrictions. VLC was under the GPL long before the App Store existed. It's a bit silly to say that they chose this particular incompatibility. Apple when drafting their license terms probably did not even consider the GPL, but their choice of terms is, in actual fact, banning GPL licensed transactions from using the App Store.