That seems possible. Perhaps like the UNIX of old, Solaris et al, the ultra-stable ‘enterprise’ Linux distributions will retreat to large enterprise customers?
I'm not sure that RH/IBM is in the position of "nah, they can either pay or go home, we don't care".
This stance will not only start a slow-shift towards Debian and Canonical (Containers are portable, right?) but, will open some gap for Oracle Linux. I bet RH wouldn't like that.
This will only happen if no community replacement for CentOS gains traction. I wouldn't bet on that.
Me neither but, for some of the user base (HPC, Scientific computing, et al.), new model might not be sufficient. We'll see that.
The issue is too deep but, there are some older comments by me: