That effectively makes it useless. The whole reason to use CentOS is because it's binary-compatible with RHEL; it's merely RHEL without the expensive licensing

That effectively makes it useless. The whole reason to use CentOS is because it's binary-compatible with RHEL; it's merely RHEL without the expensive licensing fees and support. So it's really useful for developing software where your customer is the US government or someone else standardized on RHEL. Luckily, according to Wikipedia there are two new distros that have popped up to fill this need: RockyLinux and AlmaLinux.