Nobody actually cares about the kernel. They care about having control of their phones instead of the company that sold it to them, and they care that the userspace is normal, rather than weird and constantly changing according to the whims of the company that sold it to them. They do not want to carry conmen, swindlers, and spies in their pockets.

People mocked Stallman for saying GNU/Linux. Turns out it's important to specify what you're talking about, or people will misunderstand you. I use Debian. If Debian rebased to BSD (forked and relicensed to GPL, with gnutils) I'd probably still use Debian. If iOS rebased to Linux, I still would never consider touching it.

My opinion is that people actually want the political protection offered by the GPL and the people and projects who stick to it, like Debian (and others.) They do not acknowledge this to themselves. They usually want to be able to layer a few proprietary toys on top, but those are visitors who will be ejected for bad behavior, and they want an OS that will rat on that bad behavior when it sees it. They are afraid of this political project because they are afraid of politics (or because their professed meatspace politics turn out to be the opposite of what they actually want in their own lives.)