There's a podcast I listen to on occasion, 2.5 Admins, and with the CentOS news that came out last month, I was reminded of an episode where a person asked if they wanted to get into [system] administration, which should they master first, Debian or CentOS. The discussion was about a month before the CentOS announcement and can be heard here starting at 22:50. The tl;dr of the conversation was as I understood it "Debian because cloud, and you can learn RHEL stuff later if needed."
Would you give the same advice to a person new to IT and looking for focus for the beginning of their learning journey?
I'm glad I finished the RHCSA, but, for me, it would behoove me to become more comfortable with Debian based distributions at the very least to make my skills more marketable. And despite really just now trying to make my way out of the Windows administration space, I'd likely give the same "learn Debian" advice to a newbie, especially if their interest lies in AWS stuff.