It wasn't a live or die change but people seemed to have freaked out somehow.
However for security issues it's the other way around - RH won't release security fixes into centos until they've rolled out across all their sold products, even long-term maintenance releases of old OSes. This can take weeks.
End result: many bugs, often broken, and can be missing security fixes for far longer than any sensible user would be comfortable with. It's a product to make facebook (who are the primary user of it) happy essentially, and very little else.
You complain about fixes being slow but I don't see they were instant before as a community supported distro.
It doesn't refer CentOS as a beta release of RH.
https://www.centos.org/distro-faq/#q5-does-this-mean-that-ce...
I don't know what the actual rate of bugs ended up being; I burned CentOS from my infrastructure when the news dropped.
> It doesn't refer CentOS as a beta release of RH.
Yes, RH is quite attached to their lie that the thing that gets changes before the next stable version of their commercial product isn't a beta. It's unclear to me whether they somehow actually believe this (and if so, why they're giving free users a supposedly better product than paying customers), or if not why they expect anyone else to believe them, but that is indeed their official claim.
One example for this is their UBI (universal base image) which should be used to build RHEL containers. The image is "free to use" and therefore they removed lots of packages from the included repos. Many packages cannot be installed - with the current version 9 they removed even more packages. This is really frustrating and time consuming.
My recommendation: use Alma or Rocky Linuxes as an alternative