Completely agree. It's been 18 years since Nvidia released CUDA. AMD has had a long time to figure this out so I'm amazed at how they continue to fumble this.
AMD's software investments have begun in earnest a few years ago, but AMD really did progress more than pretty much everyone else aside from NVidia IMO.
AMD further made a few bad decisions where they "split the bet", relying upon Microsoft and others to push software forward. (I did like C++ Amp for what its worth). The underpinnings of C++Amp led to Boltzmann which led to ROCm, which then needed to be ported away from C++Amp and into CUDA-like Hip.
So its a bit of a misstep there for sure. But its not like AMD has been dilly dallying. And for what its worth, I would have personally preferred C++ Amp (a C++11 standardized way to represent GPU functions as []-lambdas rather than CUDA-specific <<<extensions>>>). Obviously everyone else disagrees with me but there's some elegance to parallel_for_each([](param1, param2){magically a GPU function executing in parallel}), where the compiler figures out the details of how to get param1 and param2 from CPU RAM into GPU (or you use GPU-specific allocators to make param1/param2 in the GPU codespace already to bypass the automagic).
Back then AMD/ATI were actually at the forefront on the GPGPU side - things like the early brook language and CTM lead pretty quickly into things like OpenCL. Lots of work went on using the xbox360 gpu in real games for GPGPU tasks.
But CUDA steadily improved iteratively, and AMD kinda just... stopped developing their equivalents? Considering a good part of that time they were near bankruptcy it might have not have been surprising though.
But saying Nvidia solely kicked off everything with CUDA is rather a-historical.
I've been writing CUDA since 2008 and it doesn't seem that different to me. They even still use some of the same graphics in the user guide.
I wasn't so much that they stopped developing, rather they kept throwing everything out and coming out with new and non backwards compatible replacements. I knew people working in the GPU Compute field back in those days who were trying to support both AMD/ATI and NVidia. While their CUDA code just worked from release to release and every new release of CUDA just got better and better, AMD kept coming up with new breaking APIs and forcing rewrite and rewrite until they just gave up and dropped AMD.