There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."
I've pitched that a couple times in my career. The difficulty is that, in a lot of cases, your future business prospects are genuinely correlated with the future prospects of other businesses.
Intel is going to sell fewer CPUs in the next 3 years if other businesses aren't hiring and expanding as quickly as they did during COVID. And I think there's a pretty good reason to think that Intel's revenues will actually shrink as a result.
That limits how much zig they can do while others zag.