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I can only add my anecdotal experience. When the Linux servers are running proprietary code that has a high support cost it would often make sense to have a paid Linux distro as well to avoid finger pointing games. For example, even if I knew what the problem was I could put Redhat and Oracle on the phone together and let them hash it out. They would have to find the root cause and that would be provided to our customers regardless of what they find. I know it sounds weak but that was a good way to shield our business from paying out downtime credits when a vendor had a serious bug and tried to blame us. We had clauses to protect ourselves when we were not negligent. I know this will be an unpopular answer but I know that many large businesses follow this logic when writing their contracts.

Yes. They're "the norm" in some countries and business niches ( e.g. banking, but not Germany, there it'd be SUSE), software only comes packaged and tested for their OSes, etc.

For everyone else, there's Debian/Ubuntu/whatever.

> I have never heard of anyone choosing Red Hat as their Linux flavor for their servers (or clients) or even in their top 10 flavors

Do you mean you've never seen someone running CentOS or Rocky? It sounds like that's what you're saying, and if so, that's really surprising.