Valid notion. I don't really know the impact to top of funnel, but it seems like such a gamble to me to tighten the pipeline so much, exclude so many from starting.

It's starting to change, but for years people would look at me like I was crazy for running Debian/unstable aka Debian/sid on my machines/personal servers. Being willing to have volatile systems is a big barrier. Only having "dogfood this wip" or "pay us" as the two options is a radical ask, one that doesn't really seem survivable to me (rh/centos won't go away, but their mindshare seems likely to implode to me).

Speaking for myself, I have a home server. I bought it almost 9 years ago, and the server (haswell-grade xeon) is still perfectly ok for home-server stuff, like a NAS and plex. When I set up the server, I picked CentOS 7 because I wanted a simple, boring OS that got updates for a long time. Sure, I could have used Debian or Ubuntu, and done an OS upgrade every 3-5 years, but I just wanted to avoid it.

Last year, with RH cancelling CentOS, I switched to Rocky expecting another 8+ years of updates. We'll see how that pans out.