Yes also a gray beard and been around long enough to tell you RHEL is and will continue to be legacy and will continue to dwindle into obsolescence. You mentioned the cool stuff Fedora is doing, that is not RHEL. CoreOS is the future.
RHEL Image mode is a new approach for operating system deployment that enables users to create, deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a bootc container image.
This approach simplifies operations across the enterprise, allowing developers, operations teams and solution providers to use the same container-native tools and techniques to manage everything from applications to the underlying OS.
* How is RHEL Image Mode different?
Due to the container-oriented nature, RHEL Image mode opens up to a unification and standardization of OS management and deployment, allowing the integration with existing CI/CD workflows and/or GitOps, reducing complexity.
RHEL Image mode also helps increasing security as the content, updates and patches are predictable and atomic, preventing manual modification of core services, packages and applications for a guaranteed consistency at scale.
---
I know all of this already and honestly I’m just amused at how long it has taken. Forget I said anything. Enjoy working on rhel for the rest of your life.
RHEL is the enterprise gold standard.
Fedora is a lot of the pipeline for it, which itself has become an incredible server and desktop platform.
All the work with Open shift, backstage, podman / qubelet, etc.
They're going to be fine, from my graybeard position.