It's hard for me to dismiss what is the closest to a "Mutually Assured Destruction Pact" in software licenses as merely "FUD".

Absolutely the commercial license business model is driven by that threat of "nuclear" retaliation. But that doesn't necessarily make that business model correct. (In some ways it seems rather skeevy, negotiating with someone that has an untested "nuclear device" and is threatening to use it.)

Also, just because it is untested doesn't make it any less of a nuclear device. Einstein and Bohr and a few other mathematicians had a very good idea of what a nuclear bomb could do before one was ever built or tested. We can make, based on the (poor) wording of the AGPL, some pretty good assumptions about how badly it could be used in a court of law should someone actually try to call in their threatened strike. (Everyone is too afraid to let that happen, but should it happen, it may be devastating, and worse no one knows in which direction: if the AGPL will prove to be so virulent as to be toxic or if the AGPL will open questions about enforce-ability of copyleft clauses in what are ostensibly presented as copyright licenses that risk even the GPLv2 falling to a dangerous counter-precedent. Either way, a source for great damage to the software industry should the AGPL ever go to court.)

Depends whether you value money more than code contributions.

I don’t think it would hurt to have AWS release some of their software, like the Nitro hypervisor. The world would probably benefit from that more than any license they’d have to pay.