they will lose some customers over this

You'd be in a much stronger position to argue the point if you were already a paying customer and you cancelled your subscriptions because of this policy change. Existing customers have the most leverage in influencing strategic business decisions for any for-profit business.

Those of us who are not paying customers(and I am not a paying Red Hat customer) can still have impact if we engage in reasoned debate on the merits of a policy and the actual harm it is causing to the ecosystem. As a Fedora community member and Fedora user this particular policy change does not directly nor does it indirectly impact me, so I don't have an authoritative voice in challenging the policy. The kernel in question is effectively dead to me. As a CentOS user it matters somewhat more, but I'm not yet sure how much more yet.

But what seldom works in coercing any business into changing its policy, is to suggest that you were thinking about being a customer and now you have been turned off because of a policy change. Even if its true, you haven't risked anything by saying it and you haven't guaranteed them any income if they revert the policy. Since you weren't a customer before the policy change there's no reasonable expectation that reverting the policy will in fact make you a new customer.

-jef