But that's the thing, there is no good thing going. CentOS used to be a community rebuild of RHEL, and you could then use that if you didn't want support from Red Hat. But that is no longer the case since Red Hat killed that. CentOS is now more like a beta version of RHEL and not a binary compatible build. At the same time, patches are made for RHEL that are kept secret and not published for CentOS.

And all of this is extra bad since those masses of CentOS installs exist because people don't really want to deal with Red Hat, but some other vendor just happened to not test their application on another distro, and corporate policies then don't allow you to run it on a non-binary-compatible system.

If there would be different packages, i.e. just an OCI image or a single statically linked program, or perhaps a vended virtual machine image, none of this OS vendor BS would exist. You would be able to run wherever you want to run, on whatever you want to run it. And some people and companies would still choose Red Hat, but anyone who has used anything else would probably not.