Rocky Linux seems to have made a bigger deal of getting and advertising sponsors than I remember from CentOS. CentOS had a subtle link to donate, but that was it. Right off the bat, Rocky Linux had a nicer looking landing page and BIG sponsor logos. And I would absolutely have thrown $100 at CentOS to keep existing, it just never occurred to me that it was needed or would make a difference.

It's not the I just want something for nothing. I'll pay for good tools, but my time is money too and if I feel myself going down a high-touch sales process with stuff that feels like lock-in and DRM, I'm gonna check out and go for an alternative pretty quick. I used CentOS all the time because I was in the position of trying to support people running my software on Red Hat. And I never had to worry about talking to a sales person, or making sure my keys for the repository were everywhere they needed to be. I would have still used it, even if I had to enter my personal credit card to get an official ISO. Even once my company had a proper agreement and partnership with Red Hat, it was still a pain for me to get a system up and running without talking to IT, etc.

Red Hat seems to have lighter-weight licensing for such use cases now, so we'll see. But at this point I've already switched over to Ubuntu and I doubt Red Hat or Red Hat clones will ever fully recover to their former glory.