Oracle also was the first to release updates last time I compared the three of them side by side, which was about a year ago. I installed Rocky, Alma and Oracle 9 on three VMs, pointed them as close to upstream repositories as possible (to avoid mirroring delays), and just started them every day to see who was the first to update. I also checked RPM metadata which includes build time. The experiment ran for (IIRC) about two months.

Oracle was consistently the first, lagging behind RHEL for a few hours (for important stuff) to a couple of days (for less important ones). Alma was a very close second. Rocky would spend days to weeks and was by far the slowest.

No, I don't buy the argument that it's good for you because they receive additional testing. If you really need that much stability that you can't take an update after RHEL has done so, introduce your own delays and test your shit on staging. I'd like my upstream to be as quick as practically possible. Oracle and Alma cover that nicely.

All this might have changed in the meantime.

Alma is based on centos stream. Centos stream is red hat.

CentOS stream is red hat.

Oracle is a different beast[1].

If it were any other company, I might agree with you. But I just don't think I'd ever touch anything Oracle makes with a 10' pole except under duress. It's better to do the work up front of just going with the alternative than risk getting pulled into that particular tar baby.

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1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2115s

It is and it isn't. They have a huge commercial interest in not unnecessarily sharing money with Red Hat for customers that basically need a supported/certified platform primarily for their Oracle products. SUSE has had fairly recent management changes (including ex-Red Hatters coming in). Red Hat should probably never have acquihired the CentOS team in the first place--not a comment on the people but bringing CentOS in-house with all that implied. And the others are fairly small.