Obvious next question: what drove the CentOS devs to sell to Redhat. From previous discussions, I understood that it came down to lack of resources / devs to maintain and support it. So OP's question is on point: what will Rocky Linux do to avoid a similar misfortune?

What drives anyone to sell anything? Money.

There isn't any evidence that I'm aware of that this decision was influenced by IBM (correlation doesn't equal causation).

There isn't any evidence anything causes anything else. Cartesian dualism is irrefutable. So for all we know we live in a world where IBM destroying everything they touch is purely the will of a malevolent daemon who wants to tarnish the good name of the company that enabled the holocaust.

big OOF