> because after all these years GPL seems to have lost steam
I don't see how. The non-GPL efforts you mention are all in places where it hardly was GPL before or if it was, it was packaged in such a way that it hardly mattered.
Game consoles always used BSD because game companies are notoriously proprietary and don't care about free software, but they never did, so hardly any change there.
Android's kernel is GPL which does help as there's an ongoing effort to mainline more and more Android patches, but from an end-user perspective, because the userland is not GNU and Google never actually cared about Android as FLOSS a kernel change for Android doesn't mean much unless Android's current patches are mainlined and hardware OEMs start producing mainline-linux HW, at which point a differnt kernel would indeed be a loss for Linux, but as of now, nothing would fundamentally change, because it never meant much to began with.
> So most efforts to have a pure GNU/Linux device are bound to not survive long enough to keep a sustainable business.
If so, this has nothing to do with the GPL.
Say the Librem 5 ran a BSD kernel. How would it suddenly become mainstream without Samsung's marketing budget?
If anything, the GPL is doing better than ever precisely because the issues around privacy are becoming more mainstream. I have family members asking about alternatives to iOS/Android that were not asking these in the OpenMonoko days, which gives me hope.
On the desktop, we now have Microsoft contributing GPL'ed code, which is something. Companies like NVidia do too nowdays.
I suspect what you may be perceiving is that unicorn SV startup libraries on GitHub tend to not be GPL and that's true, but I don't think they'd be releasing any code otherwise, since they don't care about free software in the first place, so in that sense it's at least a compromise.