With the number of changes that have happened with Apple's, Microsoft's and Google's various OSes over that period it's hard to say that GNU/Linux isn't being held to a higher standard here. CentOS being the trademark-stripped knockoff of a corporate OS is the reason for the instability - when you deal in corporate OSes, you're subject to the business strategies of their sponsors. Some would say (weasel words) that the strategies of the sponsor of CentOS have been the source of instability and conflict across Linuxen for a long time now.
Isn't stability and dependability the precise reason of CentOS popularity? Do you have any source on it not being stable and/or dependable?
Still, you seem to be missing the larger point. Suddenly, CentOS is dead. Maybe I'm an outlier, but that seems like a disruption in its stability and dependability.
> [fails to be stable] for more than a decade and a half
CentOS was stable for more than a decade and a half. Whether it continues to be stable or not, that remains to be seen, unless you're an oracle :)
In principle, there's no reason why another-CentOS couldn't come about in the same way as CentOS came about originally.
...but now that CentOS has been professionally funded for so long, the bar is higher than it used to be.