The GPL would not have prevented the scenario that the top-level comment complained about. Nothing in the GPL requires rich downstream projects to send money to poor upstream projects. That's by design. The four freedoms that Stallman preaches intentionally permit distributing the software to free riders.

It would have prevented Warp from forking Alacritty and re-distributing it as a closed source product. That's what it's about. This whole scenario would have been impossible from the start because Warp would have been forced by the license to be good open source citizens.