Not really. CentOS was the “gateway drug” to get everyone hooked on the RHEL ecosystem, which they could then convert to paying customers. It also allowed many vendors free and fully compatible access to make their products for the RHEL platform. Now that that’s gone, the converting users will dry up, and the vendor software will dry up.

By saying it was “not useful” to them, they really have an extremely limited and short-sighted definition of “useful”.

It really should not have been such a huge extra effort to keep CentOS around in its previous form. RH is already building the packages for RHEL, and CentOS could almost be a side-effect of that process.