Yeah, I've always been pretty skeptical of the "Intel just sat doing nothing" narrative. The impression I got back in the day is that they went quite hard on their 10nm process with a reasonably ambitious set of changes, then failed to scale it to production. That had substantial knock-on effects including delays to the associated microarchitectures as well as subsequent nodes and backports.

Regardless of the reasons I hope they recover; multiple providers of cutting-edge fabrication technology will be essential.