> The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: dnf
On further reflection, I've realized that the above command only reports a short-circuit failure case. While that single dependency problem may be enough reason in and of itself not to be making threats about removing SQLite from RHEL 9 if the SQLite project developers don't accede to IBM/Red Hat's demands, the actual situation is much more fraught.
On my CentOS 8 box, I get this result:
$ dnf repoquery -q --installed --whatrequires sqlite-libs --recursive | wc -l
130