This isn't really reality-based. There are/were a bunch of problems, but it's not these.

> - Redhat kneecaps centos because some mid manager was worried he might not get this years bonus

Red Hat paid (pays, probably) bonuses quarterly, and they were (are, probably) based on stock performance. They are not and never were based on cost saving measures.

The reality is that, probably, CentOS should have never become part of the "Red Hat family". The Chinese firewall concept didn't really work internally, the vast majority of RH engineers ran Fedora anyway, and it was basically just giving CentOS better build infrastructure plus giving customers a way to buy their way out of nonsense situations. The Red Hat support agreement always said "if you're not running RHEL, we'll close your case", which frequently meant customers who ran CentOS in dev/qa/preprod and RHEL in production who were forced to install another RHEL system (which RH made no money on anyway, since they never charged license costs, only subscription fees for updates) just to reproduce an issue so the sosreport didn't say "CentOS Linux ...".

In general, the same engineers who worked bugs (or were escalated to cases) on RHEL were often part of the community of upstream maintainers anyway, and RH's policy was "upstream first, and if it needs an emergency downstream bandaid, take it out once upstream accepts a patch and backport it properly", but it was easier for customers to get attention on problems if they could back it with dollars.

Rocky, Alma, and OEL (however you feel about that) exist anyway and basically picked up where they left off. Stream probably always should have been a thing. It was (probably is) an enormous amount of work to branch, re-sync, and generally re-sync again any given Fedora snapshot to a new RHEL release, and getting it into shape was (probably is) a nightmare, because the difference between the code which is currently running on any given RHEL release and what upstream is is huge. sysvinit -> upstart/sysv -> systemd, for example.

- Redhat kneecaps Ansible by making ansible-core and forcing everyone to re-install community plugins they were using from EPEL, or buy the shiny Redhat version of ansible.

The Ansible leadership was generally terrible about open source philosophy regardless. This is nothing new.

- Redhat decides to turn Ceph into yet another garbage storage product with the same exorbitant support fees and contract payments that were the original motivation for an open source storage solution in the first place.

Open source Ceph still exists. I don't see the difference here. It's just moving it from one independent company to another independent company, at least nominally.

The systemic problem with IBM acquiring Red Hat was in a lack of good answers for many of the questions employees had (policies on open source, WFH, etc), the fact that the purchase was not communicated even to management until news articles broke, a six month cliff for "business critical" employees, and following that, the fact that IBM fundamentally believed that they could do what everyone always thought Red Hat was doing and drive the market, so they were constantly pouring money and engineers into projects that had no chance to succeed in the market rather than adopting and fostering upcoming solutions, and *that* drove engineers out of the company very rapidly.