You're forgetting to mention the part where Rocky Linux is not just a rebrand of RHEL, it's a revival of CentOS, which IBM killed off in what's effectively a bait-and-switch, forcing customers to go through the painful/expensive migration process to another distro, or the less-painful but still expensive migration process to RHEL.
Rocky Linux is a shining example of both a free market and the open source community working to the benefit consumers. I don't see how that's unethical.
Sadly, the decision to kill CentOS was entirely Red Hat's. The self-appointed 'community managers' decided that the community didn't actually want CentOS, they wanted a free version of RHEL-Beta called "CentOS Stream."
Nobody said it was a community choice. Red Hat's own layered products (OKD, RDO, oVirt) needed to be based on a distribution that leads RHEL rather than one that trails it, and that's why CentOS Stream was born.
Dropping CentOS Linux was a completely different thing and one should also acknowledge that there are two very different parts of the CentOS community.
Those that simply needed a free RHEL, didn't have any benefit from CentOS Stream. However, their usecase is filled by Alma/Rocky.
Downstream CentOS distributions however only got benefits from CentOS Stream. There are many private ones, for example Facebook runs on a CentOS derivative, but the most prominent example is Alma itself, which existed (IIRC with another name) even when CentOS Linux existed.
And to be honest, only the latter are really part of the community. Downloading an ISO doesn't make you part of the community. I myself used CentOS Linux on a small EC2 VM but I didn't consider myself to be part of their community (I have since switched to Amazon Linux, for what it's worth).
So all that Red Hat did was basically restructure their collaboration with downstream distros. On one hand they enabled those distros to collaborate even more to RHEL development, which is now public (including individual patches to the kernel, if you remember the circa 2011 kerfuffle). On the other hand release rebuilds are entirely in the hand of the community.
Now, I am not saying everything was perfect. The announcement sucked in many ways, and there still isn't a good solution to use RHEL container images on public CI. People inside Red Hat (including me) will all tell you the same. However, it's intellectually dishonest to ignore that there was and is a CentOS world that goes beyond "I need free Linux and I don't/cannot use Debian", and Red Hat has been very receptive to the needs of that world.
> CentOS world that goes beyond "I need free Linux and I don't/cannot use Debian", and Red Hat has been very receptive to the needs of that world.
There really wasn't a CentOS world beyond that, because it wasn't a true community distribution. Red Hat never attempted to meaningful involve the community, all board members or whatever pretend org CentOS has are RH employees. There were never any kind of community elections or anything of the sort.
There totally was. Facebook had been running CentOS long before Stream, and had several RPM backports to CentOS 7 on GitHub. And guess what, they love CentOS Stream. The default desktop distros for Facebook developers are Fedora and Stream.
Honestly if all you know about CentOS is "download ISOs and report bugs that with some luck will be forwarded to RH Bugzilla", you don't know anything about the CentOS community.
Again: downloading ISOs doesn't make you part of a community.
Facebook is the exact example the self-appointed CentOS leadership used. So you're either part of that cohort, or you're really drinking their koolaide.
Rocky Linux is a shining example of both a free market and the open source community working to the benefit consumers. I don't see how that's unethical.