You might be right. Ubuntu and Shuttleworth certainly captured the void left for a polished Linux distro after the pivot. I think there was value to something being used personally and at work.
Right. My own experience was that I paid for a copy of Red Hat Linux, shipped in a pretty box and everything, and then within a year or so discovered that that was the end of the line.
Although technically it was supposed to have been possible to switch to Fedora at that point, the rollout and info around that wasn't at all clear.
My reaction was oh well, guess I'll use Debian - and later, at every company I've worked at in the intervening decades, encouraged use of either Ubuntu or Debian, or provider variants like Container-Optimized OS. No-one ever objected to that, because Red Hat was doing the "enterprise sales" thing, and ain't nobody got time for that.