I can assure you existing customers(non business) do still use a disproportionate amount of support. Things like feature requests, lost passwords, new user on boarding, any time anything doesn't work as the user expects, etc
As for the finances here sure it gives up some income but will also free up a lot of time for someone who is currently doing support so they could focus on other things
While unfortunate for consumers I get it. Usually consumer customers use more support than business ones while paying significantly less and element still has to make enough money to keep going.
It was dark and rainy
Which is probably how it happened but yea doesn't seem like Google's fault.
I've often seen set ups where Prod is RedHat because support, and Test and Dev environments are CentOS to avoid the fees on less important environments.
The two major benefits of RedHat seem to be:
Now LTS is provided by others but the support isn't always there. A lot of enterprises like the support as sort of an insurance if they lose their experts.
Personally I don't agree with enterprises that think that way, but it is the reason it has stuck around so long.
What would you recommend here instead? Or rather what are you using for your daily driver?
While this is definitely a factor I'd place the issue one more level up. Businesses typically do not prioritize security at all. This then causes an adversarial relationship. Ops team has kpi/goals to get shit done and none for doing it well or securely so understandably they don't want to "waste" time with the security team's requests. This of course assuming there is a security team at all or that the ops team isn't outsourced and gives even less of a shit what the quality/security is