could Red Hat eventually take control of the project?
Yes, and they could eventually take control of debian too.
Why bother mitigating such far-fetched risks though?
The mitigation cost is similar to the remediation one (ie. you'll just have to switch distro either way), and it's also likely to go down as the risk increases (ie. people will fork off fedora far sooner than the risk of it actually doing whatever bad things you fear Red Hat is gonna do to it becomes a practical concern).
BTW: are you aware the Linux Foundation is an US entity and funded by (among others) most US IT megacorps? (interestingly, amazon/aws is only a silver member - Bezos must really be a cheapskate)





I just meant that anything can happen eventually - debian wasn't the happiest example