In computer engineering grad school, I mentioned to my PI that there was an upcoming hardware security flaw that I had heard about from … sources… and he quickly guessed it was speculative execution related without knowing anything more. I think people knew it was possibly dangerous, but the performance gains from speculative execution were huge enough nobody in Intel/AMD red-teamed the design basically.

probably incentives are not well-aligned

i mean meltdown didn't exactly crater intel's sales

To be fair, there's a lot of low quality security research out there, pointing at totally impractical attacks. But ok, these are not Dan Bernstein ;)