I have no idea about their internals but I’m curious how many people used docker’ own registry offering as their repo manager of choice because it’s configured to lookup the docker registry by default. Easier to setup pipelines and dev env workflows etc.

If this move means that people have to now manage access to multiple registries like quay and ghcr, will that also incentivize people to go ahead and try migrating to these other registries. Especially given that dockers own registry has such poor permission management.

They've historically had trouble having that loss leader lead to a non-loss.

Loss leader for products that don't sell? The change to a full open source toolchain for their core products was more or less painless.