Repairing extremely out of date server

You may either perform an in-place upgrade using LEAPP or migrate all sites to a new platform using the migration tool. Unless you’re emotionally attached to that machine, migrating sites to a new platform is the best option as it gives you an opportunity to troubleshoot any sites individually before migrating to a new environment.

I’d recommend Rocky 8 at this point.

AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux set out to be bug-for-bug rebuilds of RHEL8. Alma walked back on this pledge, Rocky has not. I’ve seen two separate users running into system hangs on fresh install with Alma that could not be reproduced with Rocky. ABI compatibility, what AlmaLinux is now, is a much weaker standard than 1:1 rebuilds, what Rocky still is. With the complexity and criticality of both kernel and systemd - the more engineering resources on code the better it is for stability.