Kendo SASS themes allow the definition of a variety of colors for grid rows that are applied in different situations:
However, at least in @progress/kendo-theme-classic (v. 5.4.1), $grid-selected-alt-bg is only applied for locked columns. You can check that by doing a string-search for "$grid-selected-alt-bg" in dist/all.scss. I have not checked if the same happens when using other themes.