Permissive license is basically for you and contributors to provide free labour and when mature enough, big corp X can just exploit it and use it for their own benefit off your free labour if needed.

There are actual good and big projects that use permissive licensing that have not been overtaken (postgres for example) but they mostly have very strong, cohesive business and market plan to achieve that, plus the bature of their software.

If your software is actually complicated and useful, don't let corporations exploit it for nothing.

MIT and BSD are the corporate friendly licenses that say you can take my code and use it and even make it proprietary, as well. So long as you provide attribution, do whatever you want.

If that’s fine by you then choose that license. You can read little summaries here but be advised this page is owned by GitHub and they have an interest in seeing MIT and BSD adoption, so the language they use subtly reflects that IMO https://choosealicense.com/licenses/

Ooh, yes for for this case, the LGPL would be a good middle-ground for OP's concerns.

do mind that (and i'm pretty sure this still works with AGPL but this isn't gospel) you can have the engine be open source while keeping the assets proprietary and requiring they be purchased to actually sensibly play the game.

This is how the original DOOM works, there's an ocean of modified doom engines but you still have to buy the assets to play the proper actual DOOM game. You can use alternative asset packs but it'll look and sound like a fairly different game.
And of course it's vastly easier to create alternative assets for such a simple game, compared to the labour that would be involved in a larger modern game.

That was a frustrating read. Dude gets screwed by Microsoft who effectively steals his code and rebrands it as theirs and then he goes on to talk about why he prefers MIT.

That's understandable, though one of the other commenters suggested the LGPL which might make for a good fit for your case. Here's a comparison with the other two if you're interested.

The AGPL is just the GPL with extra rules requiring sharing the code even if you expose it exclusively via a service.

AGPL is GPL + network services protection (preventing someone taking your code and spinning up a for-profit selling services without contribution back). If you don't care about people stealing your code, closing it, and selling services based on it, then there is no need to consider strict copyleft licenses.

Which one has that?