> These companies make good profits

They don’t make good profits. TSMC has fairly mediocre numbers by the standard of the tech industry. Intel has really bad numbers for the last several decades. AMD was having so much trouble with foundries that they spun it off.

Bean counters/“profesional execs” have been in charge for a long time (as is usually the case when founder CEOs leave/die), middle managers are box checkers that can’t differentiate good employees from bad employees and nobody cares as long as salary&stocks are deposited in their account. All of this gets lost in the cogs of the 100k employee machine.