Red Hat used to be a lot more lenient with the clones, just like Microsoft didn't care whether you used a genuine copy of Windows/Office or not. They probably assumed that once you became accustomed to CentOS, you would naturally buy RHEL when an enterprise project came along.

Maybe that's still a reasonable assumption to make. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it was in the past but isn't anymore due to the proliferation of clouds, serverless, saas, whatever.