I have no love for oracle, but in general the only freeloaders in FOSS development are companies that use the work of a whole ecosystem of unpaid developers and then use loopholes to restrict access.
“Lazy clones” are vital to maintaining the interoperability and openness that make RHEL (or any other corporate distro) attractive and keep them accountable for anticonsumer practices, preventing enshittification. Only when the company starts actively harming their product, or trust is lost, will clones hurt sales.
If they want a proprietary OS, they can build it themselves. The value proposition has always been in the support and service ecosystem and infrastructure provided by the corporation. Only when the company starts actively harming their product, or trust is lost, will clones hurt Red Hat’s business.
My university uses Rocky. If it didn’t exist, they would probably just use debian. Because it does exist, hundreds of students will be exposed to and learn to use enterprise linux, and will likely contribute to its corporate user base at companies that require RHEL.
If they kill clones, they are killing the on-ramp and ecosystem that makes their paid offerings so dominant. Students will learn something else, developers would deprioritize rpm, making their paid products less attractive.