They did, but they still seem to be clearly leading among commercial linux distros, and the software they push keeps getting adopted while Canonical's does not. To me this reads as strategic maneuvering by Red Hat within the Linux ecosystem, and they're doing great at it, from what I can tell.
I write that as someone who finds them to have astonishingly poor taste and wishes they would knock it off, so I'm no Red Hat fan—but they do seem to be succeeding at some kind of broader own-the-core-software-of-Linux-outside-the-kernel-without-technically-owning-it strategy, by steering Gnome and systemd and having significant control over a complete (and, conveniently, architected such that it causes a ton of work for everyone who doesn't just adopt Gnome) replacement of heart of the GUI stack. Not that Canonical's much better (OMG, Snaps, WTF are they thinking)
Snaps are pretty fantastic for IoT, which is where we started. We have some sucky things to fix for snaps on the desktop, such as astartup performance and permission handling when you want to go outside the sandbox, but we will fix those.
If you really care about security and reliability across multiple Linux distros, then containerised software distribution is particularly challenging. But it's a fun technical challenge, and we have an amazing team that's dedicated to getting it right.
Our goal is very secure, very reliable, very seamless software distribution across any Linux, and as far as I am concerned it's great that there are multiple teams working to figure out that hard problem. How lucky for you that we're not all just stuck with one option!
I write that as someone who finds them to have astonishingly poor taste and wishes they would knock it off, so I'm no Red Hat fan—but they do seem to be succeeding at some kind of broader own-the-core-software-of-Linux-outside-the-kernel-without-technically-owning-it strategy, by steering Gnome and systemd and having significant control over a complete (and, conveniently, architected such that it causes a ton of work for everyone who doesn't just adopt Gnome) replacement of heart of the GUI stack. Not that Canonical's much better (OMG, Snaps, WTF are they thinking)