But what are the ramifications of doing away with the “free” version of RHEL in the form of centos/alma/rocky?

Personally, I never ran anything with CentOS, and haven’t touched RedHat since version 6, but I am very very comfortable spinning something up in Ubuntu or Debian at work because that’s what I’ve run on home and personal projects for the past 15 years. Although at work we are a windows shop, and few things are running Linux.

When the community doesn’t have as much experience and hands-on time with RHEL spin-offs, are the sysadmins that would make the call on what OS to use going to choose one they have little to no experience on? Or is red hat so ingrained into corporate type networks that nobody will blink at the choice and just do it?