Compagnies I've worked for that uses redhat do so because they think paying will prevent them from working. As if, sudenly, running a nearly 10y-old code was no longer stupid, because you paid for it.
I wish the places I worked made such principled decisions.
Some places did, but not most. In my 2 decades of contracting I have seen plenty of shops with a real fear of upgrading and no plan for modernizing. They are trapped in decades old tech and prefer it that way for no discernible reason. Worse, they often have no recovery plan if there is a problem. There is a huge amount of maintaining the status quo and trying not to make waves.
For some of these projects a team of like dozen devs could recreate the core product in some new tech in less than a year with the right institutional knowledge. But they don't for a myriad of excuses and reasons.
To be fair, if they couldn't make the decision to use a non-paid distro, would you trust them to be able to manage the updates, the ABI compatibility breakages, and so on once every year or two?
But again, paying for the distribution does not free you from the sysadmin duties
Even worse: because of the long "supported" duration, the common mindset is "fire and forget". After all, why would we care ? That stuff will be "supported" for 10 years, we'll be long gone by then. And when you have high turn-over rate, you hit the champion's title : every thing is legacy, nothing is managed, every thing is crap
I love this