It's more of a symbolic thing. FreeBSD has removed the vast majority of gpl code over the last decades. I think this specific removal was just a last lingering overlap that was difficult to replace.

Is it bad? It's subjective. The project goals were always to be permissive. There was just historical borrowing from other open source projects.

I think both approaches are valid. GPL has fostered a greater number of maintainers and volunteer participants. That's definitely its shown strength but you can also attribute fragmentation to this. Whereas BSD has created much more focused and targeted distributions. I guess that's indirectly due to the license and more the smaller group of active contributors.

It's really difficult to rival FreeBSD at certain specific usecases. I wouldn't use anything else for a NAS or a router.

It's a very lopsided distro, bad gpu and wifi support. Limited application support. Really not ideal for a desktop, nor is it really meant to be used that way.