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Where I was projects started on CentOS. Often once they got big / went to production, they were switched to RHEL.

And devs often used CentOS when playing around (ie, setting up VM's etc at home or just randomly) because you didn't need to talk to anyone to do so.

AlmaLinux with paid support on demand by Cloudlinux?

The agency tolerated CentOS but was never happy about it. The fact that it was directly derived from RHEL and could be expected to get timely security fixes probably helped make them comfortable with it. The agency is also concerned about Python2 remaining the default in both CentOS 7 and RHEL 7. Red Hat has committed to back porting security fixes for Python 2 proper, but that leaves a large universe of add on packages that might not get patched. Thus the move from both CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 to RHEL 8.

In my experience CentOS basically let you get all the security benefits from RHEL with none of the costs. So it has been popular to minimize budgets.

Sure, but that's the exact opposite of having paid support, which is why I was confused