I would wager that they knew, but execs chose to protect their personal short term interests overt those of the company and its long term shareholders. This is typical modern US publicly traded company behavior.
Throw money at it - find the best and brightest people and stuff their mouths with gold to have them solve whatever problems Intel's still having with 10nm and beyond as quickly as possible and with honest timelines to when that'll happen (not "oh it'll totally work this quarter").
Intel blowing the lead they had on semiconductor process technology is an existential threat, especially if it's blocking them getting out improvements in IPC (i.e. see what AMD are doing) also, so it's impossible to overstate how important this should be to Intel's senior leadership (by which I mean if it's not solved real soon, the shareholders ought to be removing them from post).
Same. It's pretty clear that they knew and those that were blindsided, earned to get a pink slip.