I'm in basically the same boat, currently using Linode. At other companies I've made decisions to buy RHEL and OpenShift, and would again because I've been pretty happy (we'll see how this current thing shakes out).

I also went to work for Red Hat (and took a pay and title cut) largely because I had so much love for them. I'd been using Fedora and CentOS (pre-stream) for many years. The expertise that I gained from the experience also let me hit the ground running in my new job, and I made them a lot of money. Had CentOS not existed, I would never have learned their ecosystem and certainly wouldn't have gone to work there. That's profit that is hard to measure, and it is hard to directly tie it to somebody's commission or KPIs, but I'm sure it's not unsubstantial. Many of the people I worked with had a similar backstory!

I would also say (at least when I worked there) I didn't know anybody (who wasn't a sales person) who would have called us free loaders. Quite the opposite, they considered us part of the community.