The whole principle of CISC (v RISC) is that you have more information density in your instruction stream. This means that each register, cache, decode unit, etc. is more effective per unit area & time. Presumably, this is how the x86 chips have been keeping up with fewer elements in terms of absolute # of instructions optimized for. The obvious trade-off being the decode complexity and all the extra area that requires. One may argue that this is a worthwhile trade-off, considering the aggregate die layout (i.e. one big complicated area vs thousands of distributed & semi-complicated areas) and economics of semiconductor manufacturing (defect density wrt aggregate die size).
Except that RISC-V ISA manages to reach infornation density on par with x86 via a simple, backwards-compatible instruction compression scheme. It eats up a lot of coding space, but they've managed to make it work quite nicely. ARM64 has nothing like that, even the old Thumb mode is dead.
