Interestingly it's the same with attribution requirements for art, but since it's not written words, nobody can claim: "this part is exactly my GPL code".
But with art it's "this is exactly how I do texture on metal", "this is exactly how I paint steampunk greeble", "this is how I do clouds" etc.
Definitions are what matter, they're the reason you can use words and I can understand what you mean by them.
"Open source" has a definition (https://opensource.org/osd) and the GPL meets it, because it doesn't prevent derived worries from being distributed under the same license.