all the joy of the time that the *amazing* centos team was folded into RedHat has now been poured away

I don't really understand this sentiment.  With Stream, the CentOS distribution is much more open, better supported, and more secure than the old distribution was.  Red Hat made significant improvements to the process, which improved the software delivered by the project.  Stream is a better example of what an open source project should be, and how they should work.  And the Integration SIG is one of the most exciting developments I've seen in Linux distributions in a long time.

As an engineer, Stream is a source of great joy!