Nope! Current GNOME foundation board has one RedHat employee, out of six people. RedHat contributes a lot to the project, because they are one of few companies making a desktop distro with serious resources behind it. (That, and RedHat understands open source enough that they see collaborating upstream as a net benefit). But GNOME is its own thing, and always has been, built by contributions from all sorts of places.

No. They just aren't packaging KDE for RHEL.

You are confusing KDE with X11, which is maintained by Red Hat and was announced as going into maintenance mode in favor of Wayland.

They weren't confusing it with X, though they were misremembering RH's role - https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...