Seriously, how on earth are you coming up with this? Time and again they debunk those silly claims but people just keep bringing this up on and on. Is it some sort of conspiracy theory?

It could be a conspiracy on the part of Canonical, sure. People have hidden motives all the time. Sometimes you have to deduce their motives from their actions, while ignoring their words.

I don't think there’s any serious evidence of it being true though. All we can see right now is that there are a surprising number of MIT-licensed packages replacing GPL-licensed packages. It could be a coincidence.

Some of us in the Enterprise and Governmental sector try hard to avoid software with viral licenses.

We sigh in relief every time we see a software that we rely upon changes/adds non-viral license such as MIT, Apache, MPL, BSD, and so on.

That's fair!