Kubernetes owes its success largely to Openshift and Redhat's efforts. Without Openshift, Kubernetes would just be an interesting POC. Google doesn't dog food Kubernetes. Openshift has since the beginning, and contributed significantly to K8s as a result of actual production usage. Just take a look at the top contributors and you can see the kind of contributions of the Redhat guys.
While I sort of agree with you on RHEL, I don't think this is the case with Openshift at all. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to people looking for a full solution.
Red Hat have done a lot of the productionising and packaging and got it running at a lot of companies.
I don't fully agree that Red Hat has more ownership of the success of Kubernetes, though. They may have been necessary, but by no means sufficient. The aura of Google has probably had far more importance in the momentum to date.
CNCF owns the Kubernetes project. Google provides a lot of resources, and so does Redhat. Both are heavily involved in k8s, and both contributed significantly to its success.
My involvement w/ Kubernetes over the last few years. I've always considered k8s co-led by Google and Redhat. It's not hard to find this out for yourself - just take a look at the Github and the mailing lists, it's all open. K8s changed dramatically with Redhat's involvement.
While I sort of agree with you on RHEL, I don't think this is the case with Openshift at all. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to people looking for a full solution.