Let's say you run RHEL on your production servers. You pay for licensing those servers, which gives you Red Hat support, and also because you have proprietary software which is only supported on Red Hat.
You pay a pretty penny for those production servers. But you also need development servers, and staging servers. For those servers, RHEL would be a gigantic waste of money. It's the production servers you need enterprise support for, none of the rest.
CentOS was a downstream release of Red Hat, with the same packages from Red Hat compiled. It was, for the most part, identical to Red Hat without the support. This meant you could develop on CentOS Dev Servers and test deployment on CentOS Staging servers, and expect it to work exactly the same when you sent it to production. Lots of less licensing costs, same results.
Now, CentOS Stream will be upstream of Red Hat. Instead of getting the same packages as Red Hat, now you're getting the testing packages of Red Hat. You can no longer expect to get the same results from CentOS stream as from RHEL. The end of life for updates for existing CentOS releases has also been moved up drastically. By all appearances, Red Hat and IBM are essentially forcing companies to license and use RHEL on their dev and staging servers, by making CentOS Stream unusable for it.
Lucky for many, Canonical went and got Ubuntu certified for many of the same proprietary hardware and software systems that were previously only supported for proprietary linux distros. This means your dev, staging, and production can all be the exact same distro, and the only difference is which servers you're paying for Canonical support for. This is a recentish change though, so many companies locked into Red Hat / CentOS because of the clear path that was established between Development and Production. And certainly not every proprietary software/hardware is supported on Ubuntu, yet. Lots of companies won't switch (the structure of Red Hat to Debian is pretty drastically different), and IBM is counting on that.
I mostly agree with you (minus the cynicism), although CentOS Stream for dev and staging is still a pretty reasonable approach, in fact a good idea as if the next version of RHEL will break your app, you'll find out in development.
If you're already a CentOS/Red Hat shop there will be much easier options than Ubuntu (nothing against Ubuntu, I use it for some things and it's great, but it's pretty different so all your automation will have to be updated for the most part).
If you don't want Stream then I expect Rocky Linux will be available long before end of 2021, and RHEL might be free for your use depending on what they announce in the next month or two.
The easiest path forward is to convert to oracle linux. You don't even have to reinstall centos for that. Being rhel clone it's already supported by many commercial apps and unsurprisingly by oracle apps.
Given that's an option, this recent redhat announcement is really shooting themselves in the foot.
2. Vendor compatibility, many enterprises non-free software packages only offically support RHEL / CentOS
3. Familiarity with tooling, while it is all Linux Debian and CentOS do have ALOT of difference when it comes to administration of the system. Due to 1 and 2 outside of web development, in the US most enterprise users of Linux (ERP System, databases, enterprise Java Apps, etc) are a huge part of CentOS's user base
Number one for me is familiarity since I have a long history with Fedora and CentOS.
Secondly though selinux (once you learn to use it) is so powerful. I have seen it stop attacks in their tracks or render them inert (unable to call their C&C server for example because selinux blocks the socket attempt).
10 year support is also icing on the cake, although I typically upgrade a year or so after a new major release.
This is the primary reason I use CentOS and RHEL as well. If you are a Fedora user especially I wouldn't write off CentOS stream so quickly as it might match your needs just fine. If it doesn't Rocky Linux seems quite promising as well (though very early days still). More info elsewhere on this large thread or in this blog post: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...
