Giving users the ability to have a choice in the direction of "enterprise linux" is a large part of the reason that CentOS Stream exists. Previously if you wanted some bug fixed or some feature added you needed to beg Red Hat for it or hope that a paying customer needed it too. Now external parties can contribute to the future release of RHEL (and Rocky, Alma, etc.)

So let's say that some Rocky or Alma Linux user or developer wants to make a change. They are RHEL clones, so they can't do that. But they can now contribute the change to CentOS Stream, which is the upstream for both RHEL and their own distro. That change can be reviewed and tested by the community + Red Hat, and then land in RHEL a few months later.

This isn't theoretical, to use one example, Facebook uses CentOS Stream in production and contributes back a significant amount.

Disclosure: I do work for Red Hat. But it never made sense to me why people say that the "CentOS community was destroyed" when it didn't really have much of a community, it had _users_, which is different. It has more of a "community" now than it did previously, because the development is actually open as opposed to Android-style "throwing bundles of code over the wall".