And now that they bought RedHat, they're eagerly dropping support for all linux distros that are not RedHat, and they're attempting to lock out anyone who wants a personally affordable RedHat-like system (CentOS...). If they succeed, it may even be hard to find decent RedHat sysadmins in the future.

It's hard to keep up a trained workforce when they lock the doors so tight.

Yep. In the greedy drive to monetize the Meta's and Motorola's running Cent to force them onto RHEL, they're pulling a grenade pin and daring people to stay in the boat. Instead, they're alienating most of their future business of potential users and decision makers by attempting to emulate a worse than Oracle while disrespecting their users.

The value in something like Cent/RHEL is LTS stability. Really, the only valuable part of Cent/RHEL is the stable kernel because the userland rapidly becomes old and useless. Something like Ubuntu with a RHEL quality kernel with a 10 yr support lifecycle but without a separate foss/commercial version would be superior to either RHEL or Ubuntu. Canonical went full shark-jumping mickeymouse with their "Pro" subscription and non patching model unless you pay $.

And now that they’re McKinsey-izing Redhat, one can see the IBM footgun is still firing away.

IBM: Footgunning before the XT and before the Republican conformity dress code when it was cool to enable genocidal regimes for money. IBM is the quintessential big, dumb company that innovates in spurts and then is a perpetual loser because of all of its corporate bs.