I think they brought in a lot of engineers from outside for the GPU division. Raja Koduri came directly from AMD (which turned out to be a shit decision) and Tom Petersen came from Nvidia.
Intel seriously underestimated the software engineering requirements for their GPU division because of Koduri.
Also, I think Intels CEOs before Pat Gelsinger--especially Bob Swan--fucked up pretty hard, but Intel still had a lot of momentum and technological leadership back then. Once TSMC and AMD started to run laps around Intel (which became obvious that this would happen sooner or later at the latest in July 2019 with the Zen 2 launch) Intel should've pushed their own fab game hard, or start buying capacity from TSMC.
This may have cost them a lot of goodwill from good engineers, who don't want to work on subpar mediocre shit. Prime example is Jim Keller, who fucked off from Intel in 2020 because of "personal reasons", when later it came out that he resigned because of
an argument Intel about outsourcing more of its production. Intel could've had their own Zen moment, only to piss off the man who had a track record of producing technological leadership.
