I continue to fail to see the issue with the author, the person whose actual labour goes into the software, not your labour, deciding that they are fine with their source code being used in any way
You're arguing with a strawman you created, no one made any statements about the author. They simply said no one should use the software.
The author can choose to use the MIT license, and we can choose not to use their software.
That seems insanely entitled, but you're allowed to not use non-copyleft software if you really care that much. The authors of permissively licensed software aren't forcing you to use their software.
What do you think we're saying here? We're saying we're choosing not to use the author's software, what are you taking issue with exactly?
There are plenty of valid reasons to license a work as MIT or BSD or similar. Firstly, libraries are almost always going to be permissively licensed, not just because it allows proprietary software to use those libraries, but also because it allows permissively licensed FOSS to use those libraries. If I want to use a GPL library, it's not just that I have to make my software FOSS, it's that I have to make my software GPL specifically. If I want to make a FOSS MIT program, I can't use any GPL libraries
And we've articulated valid reasons not to replace GPL core libraries with MIT ones...
Secondly, sometimes it's because, well, as the licence text provides, I don't give a shit what you do with the code
Good for you? This isn't about you (the author)... It's about us not wanting to use your work, which you seem to take offense to, as if you did us a favor. Talk about entitlement.
But my MIT/BSD code requires 0 maintenance labour from me, and I don't care to control how other people use it. That's the whole point of MIT/BSD/Apache/etc. It's the "don't give a shit" licence.
Solid justification for using it for coreutils you got there...