SUSE makes money by selling enterprise support. They don't care what they support, they have sold support for RHEL for a very long time.

The SUSE distro exists so that they can sell support for it. And it will be the same for the SUSE supported RHEL clone.

Companies using RHEL or SUSE and paying for support usually don't switch. This is one of the rare moments where SUSE has a real chance to expand their market share in this space.

I'm sure they calculated that it's better they cannibalize their own product vs. letting others do it...