It was purely a communication issue and a tempest in a teapot. There are great replacements for CentOS Linux, and Red Hat employees are now all working on CentOS Stream (development is done in Stream) instead of having just a handful of people doing the rebuilds.
I for one don't miss having to ask permission months in advance to backport a bugfix to a weird RHEL package! A lot more decisions can be taken in autonomy by developers.