I think their designs are meant to be lagging, M1 isn't "just better" it's a lot more about media encoding and packing more types of cores together, which while innovative is not what ARM should be doing.

ARM makes prototype designs that you can extend, M1 is an absolute success of that model.

Regardless: you say they've failed as a business, your metric is how much they earn from being nearly everywhere.

I would pointedly disagree: they're everywhere, that's success, they're everywhere and profitable. There's absolutely no need to rent seek... this is unsustainable capitalist thinking.

They're able to innovate and turn a profit with their "modest" income, why do you need them to do more than that? How do you know they would do better with more money?

Intel (yes, apple to oranges) has many orders of magnitude more money, but most of it goes into bureaucracies.

See also: Microsoft, Oracle