I appreciate the nuanced view. Let me add a bit of color though and point out where the "rumors" are wrong.

Subscription management of RHEL has always been an issue. There were ample ways of getting an evaluation set up or a free developer subscription but the backend work needed to get these done seemed insanely complex. I remember at some point hearing that for every free eval subscription an actual "sale" was recorded in the backend ERP (SAP?) system at Red Hat. That made quick drive-by downloads not feasible.

The developer subscription was a bit of a "hack" to extend and required you to go to an incognito window without cookies, authenticate to the developer portal which would then drop in the dev subscription into your Red Hat account. This was documented in https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-... point 14.
I cannot fathom what backend juggling necessitated this workflow.

For larger companies, managing subscription/entitlement keys was sometimes a hassle. I've heard of a handful of companies that paid for commercial RHEL subscriptions but most of the time just installed CentOS in prod as it was less of a hassle. There interesting thing here was that number of paid but unused RHEL subscriptions stayed mostly aligned with the number of machines in use.
Other companies had RHEL in prod but CentOS in non-prod policies simply because it enabled quicker turnarounds and deployments.

The rumor that CentOS was on the brink of ending is something I find _very_ hard to believe. The CentOS project was a small group of people which - to the best of my knowledge - were all gainfully employed in the Linux/Admin space or sucessfully self employed as consultants and did the CentOS work in their free time as a hobby. For the consultants the CentOS connection might even have been a door opener.
Bandwidth and hardware for mirrors, buildservers and webservers etc. were exclusively donations, as is very common for these projects.
Even with a minimum of financial contributions or not even any at all, keeping such a project alive isn't difficult. After all, nobody is depending on the money for their livelyhoods and it's a hobby after all.

In the past there were times where drama hit CentOS-land. In 2009 LWN reported on the CentOS project founder disappearing a while ago and donations not reaching the project: https://lwn.net/Articles/345028/. That article seems to support my impression that financial contributions are not really relevant to the success of a project suhc as CentOS.

The issues with CentOS seemed more around life happening to people in control and then the project suffering: https://lwn.net/Articles/460791/ is an article from 2011 about package builds and pushes happening with delays.
These issues however seemed to have been resolved some time later and delays seemed to be much less common. Interesting point: That article was contributed to LWN by the same author as the original post.

Now, considering these data points I wouldn't put a lot of faith into any rumors that CentOS was going to collapse and Red Hat came riding in to safe the day. I'd say it is much more likely that Red Hat had decided that RHEL was too restricted and fedora way to "fast and loose" to build an enterprise developer community around. Instead it might be a good idea to grab the CentOS and turn that into the development basis for ISVs, 3rd party commercial vendors and other open source projects.
The Xen 4 CentOS project was a great example for this. Taking into account that a lot of these projects and special interest groups were announced shortly after the acquisition, I'd say this view isn't far from the truth.

At the end of the day, the moaning about a free alternative going away is kinda ridiculous I think. I know large users of CentOS (hundreds of thousands of machines) that had a look at CentOS stream, did talk a little bit about it amongst their different departments and decided that Stream is fine for them. If it is fine for these kind of shops, it can't be that bad.