My guess is IBM and some RedHat people decided to be greedier than than they should and by shutting down access to the RH repositories somehow they think they can squeeze as many companies as possible to pay for Linux.
Terrible how good things are ruined by greed.
I disagree. I think the mistake was bringing CentOS in house: legitimising a free version of their own cash cow.
It is virtually Rule No. 1 of business: don't compete with yourself. If you are selling something expensive, don't later start to offer an unrestricted free version too.
I'm thinking a sudden change of view because of internal politics rather than an organic change as part of some master plan.
In 2019 the Scientific Linux developers announced they would stop development and collaborate on CentOS instead.
At that point Red Hat had captured the RHEL-clone world, leaving them in a position to destroy it.
I remember trying out PUIAS for a short time back when CentOS was having a lot of community issues.
I personally used CentOS for systems that I knew had a long lifetime ahead of them and for their use a distribution that could be "supported" for a number of years was the way to go. But since upgrading from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 was such a PITA, I started slowly migrating to Ubuntu LTS which makes version upgrades painless.
I think they did. Place I worked had explicit direction to replace RHEL with CentOS to cut licensing costs. Most big companies would pay when they are force to pay and no free alternatives available that'd do the job. They won't pay just because it is nice thing to do.
Oracle then forked the distribution, and their presence far outweighs CentOS.
For those who would argue against this assertion, run the command "wsl.exe -l -o" inside a Microsoft Windows command prompt.
You will not find CentOS there, and you will not find Red Hat, but the coverage of Oracle Linux is quite thorough.
Red Hat has a long history of antagonism of their partners and users, and they have paid dearly for it.