I suppose I can google/chatGPT this, but since both are unreliable I'll ask here:
Which software?
Which software?
ANSYS fluid dynamics simulator is another. All the advanced planes, future engines have been simulated with it.
CATIA and NX are advanced and very expensive CAD software (the basic licensing packages for a medium grade company can easily near a million and often exceed). Both runs only on SLES or RHEL.
Many large businesses use on-prem SAP deployments which runs only on SLES.
Debian alien worked the last time I had to install some janky rpm-only commercial software.
If the CAD designer can't get the rest of their job done with a Red Hat box, do you want them carrying two laptops and or using an HDMI switch, or that they spend 30-60 minutes futzing with .so's until the one special snowflake program starts working on their main machine?
Technically the programs may or may not work. Those programs are large and even if you have access to the source code, they can be very tricky to understand. Making all of their parts and their extensively used C++ plugin systems work in a foreign distro is probably harder than reverse engineering some hardware. They are not "janky commercial software". People can and do produce cars, planes, UAVs, latest supercomputers and ICs, satellites and even nuclear warheads with them.
Linux userspace libraries don't provide stability or featureset guarantees and distros patch them and worsen the compatibility. Enterprise distros guarantee them and take responsibility for that. In addition the commercial software developers and their customers get premium tier support often connecting you to the developers who curated the distro. You cannot expect community to provide any of that, especially after many years of tradition of almost intentional breaking.
On a practical note, I've dealt with $$$ software that only runs on enterprise Linux or particular versions of Windows. Without fail, it has been buggy as hell, and crashed if there was a slight breeze outside or under gibbous moons.
Examples:
"When you boot the computer, first click this, then that, and finally this."
"We all need to share this one laptop. No one may use the laptop for anything but this one flow in this one program because the laptop's OS install is irreplacable, and the equipment it drives costs $250,000"
"Don't run anything in the background because their verification kernel was only tested with two cores, and we can't buy CPUs that old any more"
"Don't turn the printer on until after the UI is done booting up because if it sees an HP vendor ID on the USB bus it thinks it's a spectrophotometer or a license dongle or something"
From a tamer perspective (and that's not that bad,) there are definitely vendors who will develop only against a single distro and won't set it up on anything else you've got. It's like the browser wars of decades ago and today.
This sounds like you have all the disadvantages of linux and all the disadvantages of vendor lock in.
Maybe I've been burned by iTunes DRM and short lived WYSIWYG editors, but since then, my tech stack and software needs to be flexible. Better to use a slightly less user friendly experience than to be locked in as the quality deteriorates.