GPL doesn't apply/doesn't have to be agreed to when the usage is allowed by the copyright law in another way. GPL can't override copyright exceptions like fair use (details vary by jurisdiction, but the principle is the same everywhere).
Even the license itself states it's optional, and you don't have to agree it (if you don't, you get the copyright law's default).
Author of the article is a former member of the Pirate Party and EU parliament, so they have expertise in the copyright law.
I would say that the Pirate Party has expertise in nothing apart from perhaps protecting Internet freedoms.
So the same persons that supported Napster and the Pirate Bay now want to circumvent copyright for open source software.
An unholy alliance, but the recent comments from some Microsoft brass about everything on the Web being freeware seems to indicate that these are the talking points that Microsoft and its new allies will put out.
In this article, Reda explains the current copyright laws in the EU, not a hypothetical policy of the Pirate Party. They're not a member of the PP any more AFAIK.
I expect that people professionally dedicated to a copyright reform are very familiar with it, regardless of which way they want to reform it.
The copyright laws were written before generative AI existed, so they may not be adequate or fair in the new reality, but that's the current state anyway. As Reda notes, the law is not specific enough to draw the difference between collecting and processing data for search engines (that may be using ML for retrieval) and using the same data with LLMs.
Content gating behind login screens. Scraping content behind a login screen could constitute a contract violation and would give rise to a lawsuit independent of copyright.
Even the license itself states it's optional, and you don't have to agree it (if you don't, you get the copyright law's default).
Author of the article is a former member of the Pirate Party and EU parliament, so they have expertise in the copyright law.