If you are like me and are old school and think "huh, yeah that makes me nervous" I completely understand that, but we've seen some serious success with it. I'm a skeptical person, and telling me I can't SSH to my node freaks me out a bit, but I'm becoming a convert.
I would also note if you buy OpenShift you get the infrastructure nodes (masters, and some workers for running openshift operator pods) for free (typically, but I'm not a salesperson so don't hold me to that if I've misspoke :-P), so you aren't paying for the super locked in OS. I suppose you do have to pay for RHEL8 or RHCOS on the worker nodes running your pods, and we don't support other distros (because we expect a very specific selinux config, CRI-O config (container runtime), among other things), so I guess there's some dependence there, although I recommend RHCOS for all your nodes and then just use the Machine API if you need it.
Again, I think the idea of OS is great, but you've lost us, and likely other big customers because of that restriction. Having old kernels is just not an option for some people.