I believe that CentOS doesn't release sooner when these point releases happen upstream (compared to regular errata updates) may have to do with ensuring package

I believe that CentOS doesn't release sooner when these point releases happen upstream (compared to regular errata updates) may have to do with ensuring packages outside the ones sourced directly from RHEL don't break. Packages in point releases may sometimes force some packages higher in the dependency tree to be rebuilt, or perhaps may change the dependency chain in some way. Red Hat likely takes care to release only when this doesn't violate stability guarantees for the stuff they support. If there was no CentOS, I'd say you could end up in a situation where EPEL and IUS (just to mention the most popular - almost indispensable - external repos out there) would be broken for the lastest point release for a while. That would be bad for users. Red Hat customers are less likely to be using them. After all, if you're going to use unsupported packages, why do it on RHEL instead of CentOS which is mostly the same minus support? (Also, you can follow the CentOS CR repository if you really want to keep up more closely with upstream RHEL.)