After reading and watching way too much content related to this, I think this has been blown way out of proportion.

I don't understand how anyone can honestly say that RHEL is going closed source when they know that's factually incorrect. I don't understand how anyone can say they're changing from Fedora to Ubuntu and not see the colossal irony on that. If anything, I can understand the position of RH even more. If I made a 1:1 clone distro of Fedora, nobody would give a shit about it. So, the ONLY incentive of using a 1:1 clone of RHEL is saving money.

And please, spare me the "Alma Linux is a gateway to RHEL", because any sane business will take any opportunity to save money.

Why not taking CentOS, direct upstream of RHEL, and use its code to create a RHEL competitor? Why not taking RHEL code, modify it and make a different distro instead of a bug-for-bug clone? (They've encouraged this in their blog post). The more I read, the more I feel it is because it takes work, simple as.