The Alma Linux guys seemed happy to engage with the community, for example by coming on the Linux Unplugged podcast and discussing the (at the time) future governance structure of Alma. Rocky Linux rather agressively declined to come onto that same podcast iirc.

I did decline, and so did others from the Rocky team, but it was not "aggressively".

There were multiple times that the media and podcasters would try to pin the two projects against each other, perhaps for ratings..?

Not to take the drama and flare out of the story, but we just didn't want to engage in that.