Most likely yes. There are a lot enterprises out there that only trust paid subscriptions.

Paying for something “secure” comes with the benefit of risk mitigation - we paid X to give us a secure version of Y, hence its not our fault “bad thing” happenned.

Counterpoint: most likely no, it really is about all the downstream impacts of critical and high findings in scanners. The risk of failing a soc2 audit for example. Once that risk is removed then the value prop is also removed.

F500s trust the paid subscriptions because it means you can escalate the issue -- you're now a paying client so you get support if/when things explode -- and that also gives you a lever to shift blame or ensure compliance.

I recall being an infra lead at an Big Company that you've heard of and having to spend a month working with procurement to get like 6 Mirantis / Docker licenses to do a CCPA compliance project.

I don't think this is the case here. The reason you want to lower your CVEs is to say "we're compliant" or "it's not our fault a bad thing happened, we use hardened images". Paying doesn't really change that - your SOC2 doesn't ask how much you spent, it asks what your patching policy is. This makes that checkbox free.