I think, in the short run, they are hoping some percentage of Rocky/Alma users will migrate to RHEL. I don’t believe they are really thinking about the long term.

Squeeze the existing users for cash.

The enterprises will just pay it. It’ll be cheaper than a migration for critical servers.

Corps pull the same gameplay each time:

1. Buy product
2. Jack prices to the roof
3. Kill R&D and enshittify support to minimize cost
4. Extract profit until other products make a higher profit margin
5. Shutdown support and repeat with a new product

But why would they want to kill their acquistion like that though?

I can only recommend you look at the last decade of IBM’s history in that respect.