Licensing itself is a pain in the ass. We pay low teens for Oracle Java licenses. Every year we have to audit hundreds of thousands of machines to see if it is present. When it is, figure out if it is a public version or something that requires an extended support contract. There are things like Adopt OpenJDK that don't require any licenses. Having an OS where you did not need to worry about the licensing was huge - nobody cares what you did in a docker image, on a VM, or some experiment.

I think we were shelling out around $300 a RHEL license, which was a significant percentage of the docker boxes we started putting together with some low end hardware.

The point being that there is a trade-off to be made between paying for an OS instance and having certainty of support, versus community distros with no upfront sticker price but might cost more in man-hours when things fall apart.

Anything run-the-business should have support. Anything used by developers for R&D / messing about can be unsupported.