(Apple, of course, still blows both of them out of the water.)
Qualcomm is a for profit, they are not forced to be bad, being bad mean less profit, they are just inefficient and had a different strategy, they saw competition coming and they panicked, they are not used to innovate they prefer milk their customers with small and insignificant upgrades every once in a very while as well as making use of their influence with the deep state to kill any weak competition (Samsung's Exynos)
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was a hot turd. In contrast, "plus" variation, which was the exact same chip but manufactured by TSMC instead of Samsung, got significantly better performance/power numbers.
(BTW, I think you're getting downvoted into oblivion because of the "deep state" nonsense. The rest of what you said is reasonable.)
It happened with Japan, look at them nowadays [2]
It also happened with Europe, Alcatel and Nokia, look at them nowadays [3]
For some reason, only Microsoft can get away with bribing foreign countries [4, 5]
We seen the extension of it with the ban of chinese's 5G and multiple tech companies, including huawei, wich later unveiled novel EUV patents [6], they maybe knew what they were cooking
TSMC's developing story is also quite revealing, with US officials suggesting sabotaging TSMC [7]
"deep state" nowadays has negative connotation because the government wants it to be that way ('it's a conspiracy' argument), look, it works [8]
And it's not just with tech, there are some suspicious stories in other industries, car [9] and metal manufacturing [10] for example
After all these stories, seeing Samsung having to drop plans for a homemade chip with advanced homemade fabs instantly ring bells, specially when the house was tainted with similar stories [11]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/04/18/s...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent#Lawsuits
[4] - https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_...
[5] - http://techrights.org/2014/05/28/microsoft-brazil/
[6] - https://www.techspot.com/news/97072-huawei-patents-euv-litho...
[7] - https://eurasiantimes.com/us-taiwan-should-destroy-its-semic...
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_State...
[9] - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Carlos_Ghosn (i couldn't find english coverage)
[10] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Pierucci
[11] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kun-hee#Scandals_and_contr...