What would be the point of continuing to working at Intel if you could threaten to leave and get your salary plus golf on the beach?

Beyond what pyre noted about a time limit, the kind of people who have those highly-important skills and knowledge tend to be the kind of people who are looking for new accomplishments.

I'd expect some would go somewhere different (e.g. leave Intel to work at AWS learning more deeply about what people do with those chips before jumping back), be grossly underpaid helping their favorite charity, take classes/do research, etc.

It's not indefinite. There are already non-compete contracts that exist like this, and there doesn't seem to be a problem with people purposely using them as paid vacation.

You get golf on the beach when you leave no matter how long you stay at Intel (in this hypothetical scenario). Leaving now doesn't get you more golf on the beach.

The compensation is your salary. The noncompete is part of the terms.

I agree these things are overused and need to be reigned in, but let's not oversimplify.

>relatively rare

I'd say it's the opposite. Only a small percent of trade secret theft has any chance of being directly enforced against.

Salary is generally understood to be compensation for the work you've performed; attempting to redefine it that way would require them paying considerably over the normal unencumbered market rates. Those kind of deals do happen but they're rare: people with very specialized skills or connections do get paid for exclusives and the arrangement is formalized up front and comes at a hefty premium, not hidden in what otherwise looks and pays like an ordinary job.

As for “relatively rare”, most claimed trade secrets aren't as sensitive (or hard to independently reinvent) as people like to think. When the cost is subsidized to almost nothing, people will claim everything is critical but as soon as they have to pay for it, they'll focus on things which actually matter.

No. Absolutely not. Once they stop paying the salary, they should have no say whatsoever on what I do. It is entirely unreasonable to expect someone to not be able to work for a period of time after leaving the company, and not being able to feed their family.