Intel's manufacturing woes started with the 2016 employee reduction. It just took a while for that to become evident. The brute force tactics used by HR to make sure that they got enough people to take the buyout packages back fired and too many experienced people took the attractive retirement packages. They made it clear that packages would never be that good again, and they were right. Expecting to get the same results from cheaper RCGs by driving them hard instead of keeping good, hard working experienced people is a flawed plan. People won’t share their experience to the next generation of workers if they think it is going to cost them their job. Each new process technology gets harder to implement. Not having the lessons learned on previous technology releases just makes the job harder. Intel won’t recover the manufacturing process technology lead again, they threw it away…
I think that @Xm1msyF-1ycu made some valid conclusions in his view on this.