This clearly goes against the intention of the GPL.

That I agree with. Maybe this will cause the FSF to create a 4th version.

I use Fedora, but I’m very uneasy with the fact that they are married to Red Hat. If things go south for Fedora, I hope a community driven fork can survive if not Fedora itself.

It’s free software, so you should be free to do with the code whatever you want as long as you don’t restrict the freedom of others.

Serious concern and asshole move? Yes. Gpl violation? Not sure. You could argue you are not restricted to do whatever you want with the code you receive with a subscription. But if you share the code, they don’t want you as a customer anymore and won’t give you new code. I don’t know if the GPL allows that.

Certainly in retrospect. Back then they defended the decision by saying they wanted to shift their resources to centos stream, and that would be fair enough. But now it’s clear that wasn’t their motivation at all. They wanted to kill the free RHEL fork in the hope to attract more customers, as a lot of people already suspected.

Even just using plasma I stead of gnome feels a little weird now, like it’s too windows-y lol

Out of the box it is, but KDE is very customizable, much more than Windows. You can make it behave like almost any other desktop environment.