Yeah, the saddest bit about RHEL dying is that they really were the best distro by a wide margin. Redhat beat every piece of software into the RHEL way and what came out was an incredibly cohesive system. SELinux for all the years everyone cursed its name ended up working great in the end. All while being the most adventurous and ambitious distro in terms of adopting new userspace primitives.
RedHat was the first linux distro I ever installed on one of my own machines, so it has some sentimental value for me, but it's been a long time since I used it either personally or at work.
I started doing this yesterday, and with chatgpt 4’s help it hasn’t been as bad as I feared - I’ve been able to dump Ansible playbooks into it and ask for Debian package names/alternatives - obviously it depends on what you have, and my needs are definitely not nearly as demanding as they will be for a lot of companies, but I have around 100 servers that I will be switching over, and what I feared would be a mammoth task is now looking like something I can knock out in a couple weeks
Not really because people who are using RHEL in the first place are $BigCorp which run enterprise software (for example Oracle) for which you can only get support if you run on a supported enterprise OS.
So we'd just run RHEL for the clients who needed these support contracts and used CentOS for everyone else to still have a homogeneous environment.
With Debian I can't get this kind of support. So the options are reduced to Oracle Linux and SLES/openSUSE.