Re: Why would anyone
Sadly I think you are right.
I have used RHEL commercially and recommended buying it (and have run a very large RHEL subscription account). Wanted to run the same thing at home (so used Centos later Rocky).
As a RHEL subscriber benefited many times from the many eyes of Centos (howtos, bug reports, forum posts) and the repos with essential third party software built with Centos (e.g. certbot, vlc, nvidia driver rpms, ). The extra audience provided by Centos gave me more 3rd party software availability. Additionally, just a few weeks ago I had a bug I found in Rocky ( I tested on RHEL to report), pushed upstream and has been fixed.
Without all this RHEL just became a whole lot less useful and usable. If you run a single commercial app maybe not, but in the real world RHEL just now looks hard to use as a general purpose distro.
I have used RHEL systems for many many years (decades) and contributed to this ecosystem (many many bug reports, howtos, occasional patches)
And to Fedora, I run this as a desktop (home and work) to see what was coming up in RHEL a few years down the line and to help stabilise it for this point. So my RHEL and my home Rocky deployments would be improved.
Why would I do this now? I just don't feel like doing this anymore. If my home servers head to something else my desktop will too.
RH you have utterly destroyed the ecosystem you have built. On some short term hope of gain.
At the weekend I downloaded Debian for the first time in decades and I have started playing with this in a VM. I have decided what desktop system I may use, maybe Debian maybe something else Debian based.
It's all very sad.