Is this not the same kind of argument companies make against piracy? I think it's not so much a pricing problem than it is a service problem. In the same way that people rely on Steam rather than pirating every single game on the market, it's the services that are offered rather than the price that has to be paid.

Say you go ahead and do this - what guarantees will you make with that price? Guarantees like priority support and timely package updates cost money, which doesn't sound viable unless the big company is setting absurdly high prices, in which case, that just sounds like competition.

I'd rather they didn't have to waste their valuable engineer time supporting the small niche case of some making certain magic binaries a little easier to hack on. Their time can be much better spent working on the upstream project wherever it might be hosted. As long as the license is respected Red Hat can distribute as they want. Indeed you could argue that CentOS stream provides the "preferred form" of code access required for building Red Hat like distros.

This is a storm in a teacup when we have bigger oceans to boil.