Not exactly. Maintain, perhaps, but Red Hat Linux was the standard before RHEL existed and everybody wanted a clone of Red Hat AS/RHEL to continue enjoying the free ride.
Let's also not forget that CentOS had a rocky (no pun intended) few years before Red Hat stepped in later on. A lot of folks gloss over the fact that there were periods of disarray with CentOS that involved some long gaps between updates, a whole kerfuffle about a founder disappearing and the domain ownership being in question...
CentOS, as a project independent of Red Hat, existed for about 10 years. This included several long periods of slow updates to minor versions and long waits for major versions of RHEL. (e.g. it took almost 3 months for CentOS to push out 5.6 after RHEL 5.6, and even longer to get CentOS 6 out of RHEL 6).
Before Red Hat took over CentOS a chief point of criticism was that CentOS took too long to update and the core group wouldn't let new folks in to contribute. (See: https://lwn.net/Articles/435744/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20190402181426/http://www.linux-...)
Now, users have Stream which is pretty much everything you'd have wanted except the ability to claim that it's exactly specific RHEL release. In my book a major improvement, unless what I want is the ability to get support for RHEL from vendors without actually paying for RHEL.