Not rhel clones though, which are what most small scale people are going to use. Also still no auto kernal updates.

RHEL is free for up to 15 instances (including prod), and 9.1 has pleasantly current packages. It’s a solid choice for startups and small teams who need to minimize time spent on infrastructure.

I found the one year renewal thing annoying, but other than that it looks to be really good! Just the auto kernel update part is left

Kernel live patching helps to guard against major security and bug issues and is fully automated in RHEL via kpatch.

But it's paid, I don't necessarily need livepatching, just auto restarts to update the kernel

Not quite sure which scenario you mean, but both of these work in the official RHEL distro that is free for up to 15 instances:

1. Restart is ok: automatically apply all security updates as they come out ("dnf-automatic), then restart if required ("needs-restarting -r").

2. Restart is not ok: automatically apply all kernel patches as they come out("kpatch auto")

Dnf automatic should support restart now! https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf/pull/1879

However its o my going to work on rhel 10 or anything that has very very up to date DNF version.

Only*