There is definitely a patent dispute going on behind the curtain that is preventing advancement. PCIE4 is just smoke and mirrors to give these companies time to tap dance.
My predictions is we will see a merger in order for PCIE5 and 8k rolling out.
Anyone that just wants to believe conspiracy exists behind every corner, is to going to find evidence for it wherever they look--because whatever they see, as unrelated as it is, is going to be used to justify an unjustifiable belief.
"Rumors" that Intel is buying AMD is an annual thing. It is as predictable as the number of days in a year. Fact is, AMD is one of most heavily-manipulated stocks on the NASDAQ because it is a very volatile day trader. This same nonsense Intel rumor happens every year, at nearly the same time. Call that a conspiracy theory if you wish, but it actually exists. And it's not insane because this is simply how large sectors of the market work, and it's not really a bad thing or a good thing--it just is (short sellers, in general, have real value because they are pretty good at sniffing out and taking down very bad, often fraudulent companies). You just have to point to a lot of the hilariously fake disinformation campaigns launched against AMD, particularly that one earlier last year from a well-known group of stock shorters, that invented a bug-testing company and slides just to trump up some mundane (nearly impossible) exploits as catastrophic world-ending flaws in Ryzen architecture, to understand that these rumors only ever come from trading groups (seeking to profit off of daily paper), and not actual tech-based industry reality.