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.