I'm not sure why you think that. Plenty of CNCF projects, if not all of them, are still developed by the same corporate teams that originally developed them, even though ownership has been transferred. Cilium is still being developed by paid Isovalent employees. I'm pretty sure Kubernetes is still maintained mostly by Google employees. Longhorn and k3s are maintained by SUSE employees. This isn't Red Hat's first foray. They bought CoreOS, which is the company that originally developed etcd, one of the oldest CNCF projects that even predates Kubernetes, and most of its maintainers are still employees of either Red Hat or Google.

The podman team and my team, working in the virtualization side (Podman Machine), will continue doing so

In the same way as how the Kubernetes ecosystem is the new Enterprise Java ecosystem? Often even from the same companies as back in the late 90s/00s.

Look: I'm probably ignorant, but from the outside the similarities seem striking.

Please explain why I'm wrong. I'm humble on this one.

Kubernetes is the new websphere. Yaml the new ANT.

I'm sure Red Hat will continue to pay Podman developers, just like they continue to pay developers for the other upstream projects that are hosted at CNCF (like Kubernetes).

I'm we can all think of some projects "abandoned" to foundations through the years, but in general, I'd call getting core infrastructure out of the control of a single company and into a place with more transparent and democratic governance a good thing.

Maybe open source foundations should be more selective with the projects. I'm thinking of Oracle dumping OpenOffice, although it was obvious that LibreOffice is the way to go.

Strimzi is CNCF, Strimzi still has a full time team of devs in RH.