The Itanium (as the prime example - and I bet the quote from the interview is at least partly based on the lessons learned from Itanium) failed not because there was no will by programmers to adapt their projects, but because there's simply not enough instruction-level parallelism in general-purpose code. That's not a problem one can simply "fix" by rewriting all software, much less by rewriting all compilers from scratch.

I think having good optimizing compilers goes a long way.

I.e., to the extent they reduce the need for source code to cater to the underlying CPU, less effort is needed to port software to a new CPU.

I think GCC and especially LLVM are really reducing the barriers to bringing new CPUs to market.

Maybe for GPUs as well because of shader compilers?

Software is hard to change, because there is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

And there are lots of temporary solutions in programming.