Poor old Gil...
Hindsight is always 20-20.
At the time, the Apple-NeXT deal certainly didn't seem like a no-brainer. The collective industry response was more like: "Huh. Amelio sure is paying a lot for a company that has failed three times already and is run by a has-been egomaniac."
Why shouldn't Amelio get credit for the decision he made? Granted, there were other important decision makers like Apple's CTO Ellen Hancock, who probably is the one who really picked NeXT.
Also, Amelio didn't "bring Apple to dire straits." He became CEO only ten months before the NeXT acquisition.
This is according to Steven Sinofsky, who was very much in a position to know as he was one of the people taking the beatings. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/
Instead, Microsoft did to the mobile phone space what Google did with messaging platforms and gave us endless cycles of killing and reinventing them, hoping maybe something would stick.
By contrast it’s interesting to remember how much Apple got right with the iPhone in 2007. Many of the fundamentals of the hardware, software and UX were gotten right before Apple ever offered one to a paying customer.
The problem was they didn't have a competitive software platform ready in time. In 2007 Google's Android team was already several years into developing Android and immediately started pivoting it into a touch based modern desktop class OS in a mobile package. Microsoft didn't realise that's what they needed to do until 2010 when they started work on Windows Mobile 10. But even in 2007 it was too late. They would still have been several years behind Android and there would not have been space for a sub-par licensed OS up against a free competitor that was years in front of it. The game was already over, it just took them 10 years to realise it.
https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
Apple was a deeply, deeply dysfunctional company at the time. Every division and manager was fighting a war of it's own.
This was reflected in their product lineup (a million products confused and overlapping - since they were each thought up by different divisions) and OS strategy (a million technologies, sometimes innovative, sometimes not, that didn't work together).
The sales organization was also extremely dysfunctional and was busy stuffing the channel as hard as they can so each sales division could make their quarterly numbers, and then the company was saddled with massive unsold inventory when it all came back.
The reign of the previous CEO, Spindler (best known for launching the MacOS clone program) was even more disastrous https://lowendmac.com/2013/michael-spindler-peter-principle-...
Amelio managed to identify most of the issues and their source, but he was pretty helpless to actually resolve them, since the managers in the company were so defiant. He was some outsider brought in by the board, who was he to dictate orders? It took someone with the balls and the clout of Steve Jobs to actually swing the axe on people.
Amelio planned to rationalize down the products to a few simple lines (but he was only in the company for 18 months so nobody on the outside actually knows how well that would have worked). He also tried to get the sales org to stop stuffing the channels, it worked for a few quarters and then they went back to their old ways. He started the process of spinning out Newton (when Jobs came back he just axed it outright even though it could have survived on it's own without burdening Apple)
That said, a long-term Amelio CEOship would have killed Apple - all his ideas for the future lined out in his book were 100% the wrong things to do (things like doubling down on clones). He was completely clueless as a visionary.