"it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who knows how many people that publish it for free and then to put road blocks around their derivative"

I'm always curious that people get angry at Red Hat profiting on the work of others, but few people get angry at the companies that use a RHEL clone to run their business and pay nothing and contribute nothing.

Red Hat is still releasing source code. The only thing that it's not doing is making it super-convenient to rebuild exactly its product.

Seriously - for most purposes CentOS Stream is just fine if what you want is a distro that feels like RHEL. Its one drawback is that it's not a one-for-one clone of RHEL, which generally only really matters if you are using it to run your business. Which gets me back to - why are people so pissed at Red Hat but not all the organizations that make money using RHEL but don't pay towards its development?