Some of the reason why the MIT license etc. is more popular surely has to do with the license text itself. I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. With the GPL, not so much. It's verbose and complex and has different versions.

Would it really be impossible to have a license with similar brevity as MIT but similar consequences as GPL?

Brevity maybe, but ease of understanding no. Copyleft licenses interact with copyright law in ways that permissive licences just don't need to. The closest you can get is probably MPL-2.0.

The GPL is particularly bad here as it pretends to define what is or isn't a derivative work, which is outside the scope of a licence but within the scope of a court. The EUPL was created partly because EU directives bound the viral clause in ways the FSF won't admit to, although that one isn't simple either (I'm not a fan of its compatibility clause).

No, the MIT license is short exactly because it has so little restrictions. You simply can't encode the desired result of GPL into 160 words like MIT can.