Corporate strategy isn't conspiracy. I think it's even weirder to think redhat would just provide resources in return of nothing at all, or that redhat employees won't be biased towards steering the ship according to their employers best interest.

Like I genuinely don't think Gnome or systemd or Fedora would just use a ubuntu/canonical-built core system even if it was superior in every way

And hey I'm not complaining, I use systemd (indirectly) and gnome almost everyday. I don't care where the software comes from, really, I'm just glad I can use it. But that doesn't mean we can't be aware of the power dynamics around it :)