Absolutely. RHEL and CentOS are "years behind" because it is their mission to supply a stable distro; stability in this context meaning in the ABI at foremost.

Absolutely. RHEL and CentOS are "years behind" because it is their mission to supply a stable distro; stability in this context meaning in the ABI at foremost. You can install a kernel driver via RPM that is years old, and as long as it's targeted to your RHEL version, it's supposed to just work. Same with every other application you might install. Fedora provides the rapid-release as well as rolling-release equivalent of RHEL; Fedora is the upstream for RHEL after all. Debian does much the same with the split between stable and unstable.