You're painting a picture of a way out that doesn't exist for most people (reverse straw man?). When it's about a library on which a lot of software depends then the common non-programmer has had absolutely no choice about this and cannot re-implement either.
Right, but that's not the fault of the original author. He licensed his code a particular way, and everyone else has the choice to either use it or not. I don't like the attitude of blaming him simply because lots of other people came to depend on it without realising that it's less free than some of them might have liked.
> but we can still have the opinion that he's a childish asshole.
We can also have the opinion that people who believe that someone who wrote a free software and gave the implementation for free should play by their rules and only use license which plays nice with their software are childish, entitled assholes.
Obviously that's not easy for them to do, but nobody says they have to use his implementation if they don't like the terms it's licensed under.