> You're still just arguing that Intel knew this would create huge vulns and they went ahead regardless, which is baseless.

The first scientific paper about such vulnerabilities namely in Intel processors is from 1995 [1]. They went ahead regardless. Processor technology has developed a lot. Many things that were not practically feasible in 1995 are possible today. That holds for the good and the bad. There must be some people inside Intel who must have understood that. Otherwise all that progress would not have possible. Some experts might have blind spots, but I doubt Intel microarchitecture is developed by just a handful of people.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabi...