This is not true. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is currently available at no charge to students and non-commercial users for the use cases you mentioned. And it has always been available in that manner. It even comes with additional (paid if used commercially) red hat products on top of the OS itself.
I have a tough time believing they didn't know that considering red hat basically advertises training on the free version of RHEL. They want you to pay to take the RHCSA, which costs much more than anybody would realistically spend on a personal OS for learning.
The "free" RHEL licenses still require dicking around with subscription manager, and creating/maintaining a Red Hat account. It may not be much overhead if you already have paid RHEL instances, but for somebody who doesn't it's a stumbling block.
I think it's great that Red Hat offers free dev subs and I applaud that, but I think they underestimate the friction that creates.
I have a tough time believing they didn't know that considering red hat basically advertises training on the free version of RHEL. They want you to pay to take the RHCSA, which costs much more than anybody would realistically spend on a personal OS for learning.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...