It would be interesting to get the details of how this all went down considering about a year before Van Gogh, at the beginning of 2020, there was a rumor that Apple was going to make a 5000 dollar gaming mac (that would sorta slot into where the mac studio is now). If the “gaming mac” portion of the rumor is true, that potentially raises more questions like if Apple might have wanted to keep designing x86_64 macs, and if AMD was shopping the idea of this chip to a number of parties or who put money in the development of this chip and when (as you pointed out). Again not because theres something nefarious going on, but just because it seems like a great story.
I guess in the gaming industry you shouldn't kill your darlings?
Sony was pretty pissed off when Nintendo announced they were going to be partnering with Philips when they thought Nintendo was going to be announcing they were working with Sony. So they ended up entering the gaming market to compete with Nintendo. However the PlayStation they came up with was an entirely new design focused on 3D graphics.