That's been the general theme for years now. For their own products, as long as they maintain their quality levels, I think they'll be fine on design. My understanding is they've been pivoting to become an alternative to TSMC and Samsung as a foundry source, and will be assisting with 3rd party designs similar to ARM for interested parties such as cloud vendors. But potentially with x86 compatibility for some, which would only strengthen it. Intel has needed to do all of this for a while now but if they execute properly (which is the hard part), I think the future is bright.

I do agree they won't have "truly unprecedented grasp on the industry", because I think they lost that a long time ago with globalization. The existence of TSMC/Samsung etc. I do think that means simply a larger market with more players and customers, rather than a shrinking Intel.

Microsoft evolved their business with the times and came out stronger, I think Intel will as well. I know they've been in talks with Nvidia to manufacture some of their stuff due to offshore supply being uncertain at best. If the world continues to be as uncertain as it has been, I think they're in a very different position than the widely held popular notions that you described.

It was all good, even preferable, to outsource that dirty manufacturing in the good times. I believe all the commonly held analysis that Intel is set for decline no longer has legs to stand on. I don't view fabless design firms like NV/AMD/Apple/ARM as competition. In these dark days, if you can't make things, you basically have nothing. Just a piece of paper.

AMD's revenue is half of Intel's profit. Nvidia's market cap is double intel's even though intel's profit is 4 times as high.

Intel still has a long way to fall. Unless ARM becomes dominant to the level x86 is I think they'll recover.