But looking at what Rocky Linux is saying publicly. It’s not impossible that Red Hat won’t levy their right to remove access to the sources to non-commercial forks of RHEL.

That might (hopefully) be true, but at the same time that level of uncertainty is unsuitable for a distribution. RH couldn’t ever give a formal confirmation, nor could they distribute an internal memo to keep all employees on the same page. So at any moment, your distro could stop receiving updates. The entire repo might even be taken down.