First off your argument that red hat deserves to see returns on their investment. But restricting redistribution of "their" software is a direct violation of the GPL license that they agreed to by working with GPL software.
Not to mention that the reason rocky Linux exist is because red hat killed centos.
Ree Hat has stabbed the community in the twice with the help of IBM and greed. My only hope is Oracle sues them over this express GPL violation, or that IBM's lawyers realize there will be trouble. In my opinion anyone at red hat that tries to justify this should be ignored.
lemmy does not return 502 error codes because 502 means "bad gateway" and lemmy is not acting as a gateway, nginx is. An nginx sends the html. All apps should check the status code for codes like this one that don't come from apps.