Both Mint and Fedora are community projects licensed and attributed as such, and neither corporate entity could take ownership or close either one.

I wasn’t suggesting that they would. Rather, I was referring to the strong influence that Red Hat has over Fedora. It might be fine for people who love Red Hat’s design choices, but not so much for people who don’t. That’s why I mentioned Mint as an alternative.

there is functionally no difference between RedHat<>Fedora and Canonical<>Mint.

There is, because Debian is upstream of Canonical/Ubuntu. This means Mint can easily sever ties with the latter. In practice, Mint has opted out of Ubuntu-isms more than once, and already maintains a distro based directly on Debian.