In hindsight, that does look plausible. However I'm not sure that the timeframe supports it. The company acquired the CentOS organisation in 2014, and it didn't kill off the free Linux distro until 2020. That's a pretty big gap.
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.