It’s still not obvious that Intel’s R&D is inferior (late, sure, but it hasn’t killed the company yet), and ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design.
When Intel's fabs were doing well they were dominant. When they ran into problems they were stuck in a way AMD wouldn't have been if TSMC had problems.
This is just bias. How can you know what the ultimate best judge of anything is? You would have to know what all the alternatives that could ever be conceived would be.
And I can prove you wrong more directly. If the market is the best judge of the of the best design, why is so much money spent on advertising? If a better designed product with less advertising faced a worse designed product with better advertising and always won, since "ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design", then there would be no point spending money on advertising at all.
And it didn't work very well, even on purely economic grounds. Cars are a prototypical example to think about, and they were spectacularly awful for decades. It turns out the benevolent leaders are good at figuring out what's good for their careers, and less interested in making useful products (meaning safe, reliable, fast, efficient, etc.) Even in the west there was too little competition, but it turned out that duplicating almost everything GM did independently in Japan was a great investment to be making.
Another way to say this: If 2 competitors each develop the thing, then in the worst case they spend twice as much money as in utopia. But we can't get to utopia. And in situations where there is only one option (be it enforced by the state, or just a monopoly) it's easy to go wrong by a much larger factor than 2. If you don't like cars, think about drug companies, or academic publishes, who seem happy to increase prices by 10 or 100 times if they can get away with it.