> Literally every enterprise user I work with that has CentOS uses it specifically because it directly tracks RHEL. They don't want to pay for RHEL licenses in test/dev but need a binary compatible version to ensure they can get enterprise support in production should they hit an issue. Having different drivers/kernels/libraries is a non-starter.
Unless you are doing kernelly things then the small difference in kernel version will not be that big a deal. Also for most applications, dev/test is better on Stream since it represent RHEL next. If the next version of RHEL will break your app, you find out in dev/test instead of in production like you used to. I think it's worth considering if this isn't better for your use case than previously.
It's also not very hard to compile your own kernel if you really need an exact version. I do that sometimes on Fedora when I'm testing a driver I maintain. You can also just keep the RPMs from either previous releases as well (that's not a bad idea so even if you're building your own kernel you can extract the config file from it).