You’re not wrong. It would be hard to sell CDH if you only engage with technical stakeholders. I can imagine the pitch now...

“So what you get is really old versions of everything, plus some shaded jars that will break if your classloader ever changes load order. As far as cloud goes, we’ll give you this half-baked automation (Director) and we’ll also constrain you from using any features of your cloud provider (availability zones, load balancers, Amazon Linux 2). Finally, we require you to use Oracle’s JDK but we won’t distribute it so that you’re indemnified.”