One of the most celebrated changes in SDL2 was moving from LGPL to ZLIB license. All the linking requirements of LGPL are a pain for games and distribution.
I think you meant "Lesser GPL with the static linking exception". IIRC glibc is "stock" LGPL 2.1 without any linking exception, so I may have misunderstood your comment and you mean just LGPL.
The LGPL is not viral but it has some requirements that are inconvenient when distributing a game, specially it makes static linking impossible.
AFAICT, that license comes down to “You only need to publish changes to our GPL code, not your own code that uses our code”. So, it’s non-viral.