This question is just going to draw a lot of “hey what’s your favourite distro” responses.

But if you want something EL-like that isn’t RHEL, consider the bastard child of Conectiva and Mandrake, long ejected from the RedHat family but still very similar – PCLinuxOS. It has the superior signed packaging format, and it has much of the same workflow. Its packer compatibility suffers greatly from its mageia times - I think - so they’re still a bit ghetto about anything at scale, but that’s almost the only thing they don’t have nailed-down. Their massive compatibility window delivers on everything AppStream claims but cannot.

For minimal stuff, consider AlpineLinux, which also is free of Systemd and still manages to run really well for reasons Lennart’s fans simply can’t understand.