If some company could have built 10x better transistors than the competition they could have made billions, if not tens of billions. Yet no company did this. The simplest explanation is that it wasn't possible.
Technologically it does seem possible. But if they have built it, won't somebody else built similar factories, and than a race to the bottom would have begun and nobody would have made that much money , especially relative to the money they made with new generation every 18 months ?
It certainly would lead to a lot of risk if there wasn't a consensus roadmap; once company A announced 10x, company B might try to one-up them with 30x then fail, etc.