What is beneficial to management may or may not actually be in the best interest of shareholders (and neither incentive necessarily aligns with the interests of either customers or employees).
If you believe Intel will be profitable again in the near future then paying the dividend really does make sense. Unfortunately there have been lots of companies that thought that was true when it wasn't and the dividend is how they ran out of runway quick.
If you believe your company will be profitable you should reinvest all avaliable capital into the business to grow it.
What you are advocating is contrary to every shred of logic and common sence.
No, because being profitable doesn’t mean marginal profits from expansion are available. Your plan would have all profitable firms expanding until they collapse from overextension.
This should not be true for microchip manufacturer during global computerisation. We now have microchips in sofas and handbags.
No? Then they are under investing in R&D. It's been a while since M1 came out and intel CPUs still havent caught up.
They GPUs are lacking too. Apply has AI inference functionality in their chips and great ML software support.
You don't get to tell me that they have nowhwre to invest when they are losing on multiple fronts.
I am not even mentioning the fact that they should be finding foundamentally new opportunities ahead of their competitors.