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(I would make an exception for thoughts in the form of "to prevent downstream recipients from not receiving the same freedoms granted by the license")
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No, it's an exception that lets you decide whether to grant freedoms to *direct* users or to *all* users.
This is a point where the renaming of free software to open source software dalla short. Free software is about users not about recipients of code.
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Ensuring that everybody gets to have exactly the same freedoms is the opposite of preventing X from doing Y. Sure it's possible to use it as a *means* of preventing X from doing Y, but it is a constructive way to introduce such limitations because it builds a level playing field.
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No, because *everybody* benefits from them. But FWIW I've been writing GPL software for over 20 years and I don't even work for Amazon or any other CSP so perhaps you're thinking of someone else.
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GPL has license incompatibilities even with popular licenses also considered Free Software licenses. It isn't a theoretical issue. As one example, you can't use Linux kernel code in glibc or vice versa. It definitely restricts more than just distributing proprietary code with it.
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Yes, on a licence-by-license basis the obligations that the community has generally accepted are sometimes incompatible with the goals for a particular package (like glibc), or impossible to satisfy when combined together (like GPLv2-only + Apache 2.0)
apache.org/licenses/GPL-c
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These incompatibilities wouldn't exist if GPL didn't have non-free usage restrictions. By simply forbidding restrictions it doesn't enforce, it's a non-free license itself even if you make an exception for enforcing that the software remains under your definition of freedom.
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I don't think that kind of exception actually makes any sense. It requires a lot of mental gymnastics. However, if we assume it makes sense, GPL is still non-free because that isn't what it enforces. It doesn't define that concept of freedom and then enforce keeping it.