From my position, I don't feel any IBM influence. In fact, if Red Hat were still a publicly traded stock, I believe the shareholders would have had much more influence than IBM is exercising right now. That said, from the outside looking in, I know that a lot of people have a negative view of IBM, and I can understand how they would come to the conclusion that this has something to do with IBM.
Fully agree on the "PR Problem". It's tough to "control the narrative" in OSS. Based on my observations, I think Red Hat's approach is: Deliver the facts, ride out the storm, pick up the pieces and move on.
The value in RHEL is not just in the ability to call Red Hat for support. I submit that much more of the value of RHEL is in the packaging and maintenance processes. Selecting software, making sure it's enterprise ready, patching it, backporting fixes, QA and regression testing, etc. From my view inside the machine, Red Hat is still committed to an opensource development model, and I don't see that changing any time soon. The thing Red Hat is trying to do is find the balancing point between capturing, and giving away value, as Scott McCarty explains in this post: https://opensource.com/article/21/2/differentiating-products...
Since before I became a Red Hatter, I have used CentOS for my personal servers and projects. I have struggled with CentOS Stream for that application, for example packaged kernel drivers from ELRepo. I can understand why many are upset about this. As a casual user, I am not upset, because I still have lots of options (RHEL Dev sub, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) If I had given a lot of time and effort that benefited the EL community, and in turn, Red Hat. I would probably be more upset.
I find myself torn on this issue. On one hand, I really want there to be a vibrant Enterprise Linux community where nobody has doubts or trust issues in participating. On the other hand, I also want Red Hat to continue to have a viable business model around RHEL so that the community continues to be able to benefit from all of the expertise that it gets from all of the people who get to make it their main focus because they can rely on a steady paycheck by doing so.
I think that when Red Hat was growing fast, it was easy for them to have a laissez-faire approach to downstream rebuilds. Now that the business is contracting, people have had to start making hard decisions. There's no more difficult decision to make, than to lay off people. I would not want to have a leadership role at Red Hat right now. I don't expect it's much fun.
I really worry about the impact that this has on goodwill. I think most people at Red Hat are also concerned about this. The ecosystem around RHEL will not be the same. EPEL, ELRepo, and all of the other communities that have flourished around the downstream builds are going to be impacted. Trust, when broken, is very hard to rebuild. Jeff's comments ("fool me once...") underscore the rift that is driving away good people. I worry about the long-term effects of this. I hope that this will not "kill Enterprise Linux" as many have suggested. I do believe, though, that it has been wounded.