Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

The 'E' of RHEL stands for "Enterprise". Nobody cares about your i5-2400 released in 2011 in this context, as it's not supposed to run this distro. And yes, most enterprise users will renew their hardware after a few years to save on energy costs. The fact that your 4-core 95W i5-2400 from 2011 is half as powerful as a 8-core 7W Core i3-N300 from 2023 is probably not a problem for you, but it's an enterprise's responsibility to divide power usage per performance unit by 27 like this over the years. Thus in practice a server will be installed with a distro and will run it until it gets decommissioned 3-8 years later. And that's also in this context that for such users the effort made by package maintainers to provide non-breaking updates that fix bugs and security issues is valued, because these customers basically don't have to think about the software anymore. On your PC or laptop you can devote time adjusting/fixing packages after an upgrade if you want. When you deal with 1000 servers you don't want to discover breakage every morning anymore.

I, too, used to find CentOS interesting for end users. It's just that lots of consultants install this at their customers' as a way to save money by not buying the original, hence avoiding to pay for the development effort done upfront. I'm not seeing a simple solution to this, to be honest. Maybe they should make a free version of RHEL which is trivial to activate and switch to a paid mode, to try lower the barrier of adoption, and pre-fill a number of visible config files with "this is an unregistered copy, if you value it please consider supporting our effort". But the constant guerilla between RHEL and forks is only hurting their users, community and their image by making the solution look not sustainable in my opinion.