I think the fact it's statically linked plays a role. Common licences like the LGPL won't work, leaving the MPL or the less similar but more commonly known MIT license

Wouldn't surprise if Creative Commons had something to do with this. The copyleft licenses of it, of anything more restrictive basically than MIT and "attribution", are listed as "restrictive" and "not open" or something. I think coupled with the complicated legal language versus "idk, whatever man" doesn't help for lots of new projects.

That said... Most of the stuff I've done has been so "idk, man, I made a thing for me and figured others might benefit" that I just gave it the MIT license for that reason. And it may just be as simple as that reasoning.

The rust community prefers freedom as in free to do whatever you want, copyleft has a different definition of freedom.

Remember when under biden they passed this memory safety thingy? Which it implicitly, discreetly advocated for the use of rust nonetheless

Rust might be a psyop hahaha