CentOS was nearly dead when RH acquired it

No, the problem is that there is a big lie in the root of the current RHEL distribution policy of IBM/RH.

When I was hired to Red Hat (I have left long ago, and I don’t think I reveal any company secret here) I was told repeatedly that the found of the RH business strategy is that “we don’t sell software, just support, and just for technical reasons (we want to know exactly what binaries are on the supported system, also QA) we require our customers to use our binaries”. It might be even honest statement when I heard it (2006).

Then Oracle thingy happened, and as is usual with that company they went for the most immoral, despicable, and cost effective to grab as much money as they could, including stealing information from RH support to sell to their customers and similar stuff. I don’t know how much money RH actually lost to them, perhaps it truly hurt their bottom line (although I have my doubts), but I know it completely changed RH forever. RH never managed to find a good strategy against them, because RH was never able to go after them hard (what proportion of the real RHELs are sold only to be OS for Oracle DB?), and instead they made steps which irrevocably damaged RH by killing CentOS and all other redistributors of RH SRPMs.

It is yet one another story of greed destroying something beautiful.