About ten years ago I worked in a bioinformatics lab. All the work machines were centrally managed RHEL machines. I guess it's different now?

Ubuntu basically ate their lunch for the desktop case. It used to be that commercial software required SuSE or RedHat on the desktop to get support. But especially RedHat always suffered from the curse of being ancient compared to other desktop distros. When Ubuntu became big enough for commercial software to target, people chose that because Ubuntu was just more recent.

Also, several releases ago, RedHat already started to wind down their desktop efforts, just leaving server/container/cloud as the primary use case for RHEL, with desktops just as "this could also work". That latest decision to drop a lot of desktop related stuff is just a logical continuation of this policy.