It's a server distro (unlike Mint) in the Red Hat family (unlike Ubuntu). As a server-oriented distribution it has options for installing with a bare minimum of packages, including no GUI, and typically has longer support cycles. As a Red Hat derivative, it generally features more recent versions of core Linux userland things like systemd, since Red Hat employs a lot of the developers of those features. In comparison to Ubuntu it also has far less snap packages, which some people like because snaps have various problems in their current implementation.

The target audience is people who used to use Centos, before Red Hat ended Centos 8 years early and moved it to a rolling release schedule. Its primary competitors in the server-focused Red Hat derivatives are Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, which is paid; Centos Stream, which is rolling release; or Alma Linux, which is, currently, basically the same distro due to how recent the Centos debacle was, but could diverge in the future.

It's off-brand RHEL. There's some server software that isn't compatible with any other distro. So if you wanted to run it, you either had to pay for a RHEL license, or run it on CentOS, which was the original official off-brand version of RHEL.

Then CentOS was killed by IBM/RedHat and reborn as the beta distro for the next RHEL release. Rocky Linux and Alma Linux were created to fill this niche. For example, you can run your production server on RHEL, but run your test and dev machines on Rocky while being reasonably sure that there won't be any compatibility issues.

In case you don't intend distrohopping you use this for being "an open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®."

So its actually for people trying to replace CentOS which RedHat decided to drop :)

Driver compatibility with redhat. Niche hardware like stack bypass network cards, packet capture cards, fpga cards will tend to have drivers issued for redhat, but not always for anything else. By using rocky/alma, you improve your odds to dodge hassle adapting the driver packs to other linux distros.

Net booting. Distros vary in how awkward it is to get stripped setups set up for net booting. My experience is that the redhat world distros are easier for this than the debian world.

It's a downstream rebuild of RHEL 9. The release notes page tragically fails to mentions that. Chalk that up to failures of trademark law.

10 years of support for $0. If you need to set up a box and forget that it exists (unless hardware breaks), this is what you use.

I think the target audience is people who want RHEL but don't want to pay for it -same as almalinux?

This is an equivalent to CentOS, now that there won't be any more CentOS major releases besides CentOS Stream.