[genmud]

RHELs model is to support such ancient versions of software that they don't have to support many pieces of software, because the features most people would rely on aren't in 3, 5 or 10 year old software. If it wasn't effectively required (until recently) for most US government use, I would imagine they would have a substantially smaller customer base.

[bonzini]

This is not entirely true; some packages have been removed from RHEL7 to 8 to 9, because the interpretation of "if we ship it we support it" has become stricter. RHEL9 is as new or sometimes newer than Debian 11 (bullseye).

[Beermotor]

RedHat also backports fixes, security patches, and (occasionally) features to existing RPMs without incrementing the minor version.

For example fuzzywhatsit-3.0 in RHEL could be functionally equivalent to 3.5 in another distro.

[yrro]

They even rebase packages to new upstream versions in point releases (where doing so maintains backwards compatibility, of course).