I can't personally judge yet how much this will affect their business, bad for optics and community and all that sure. But regardless the narrative still implies they were already successful (aka "a one-off success"). Businesses rarely last forever. A decade plus of success is still a big success.
The point is more about the extreme difficulty of building for-profit businesses strictly off Linux-style OSS. Where people will pay for premium versions supported by paid dev teams. Otherwise it's just a glorified consulting business and not really an OSS software selling business.
I'd be interested to hear the motivations for doing so. Whether they strong downward financial pressure or were stable + merely wanted more growth.
Did they shoot themselves in the foot? It was a lot easier selling RHEL licenses when people were running on-prem workloads. These days the support contract many enterprises want is from their cloud provider, not their OS vendor.
Maybe this supports the narrative? Assuming it goes poorly I mean.