I don't think cost of labor is a big factor here. Intel has no trouble maintaining a large enough workforce. They continually decided not to have parallel teams

I don't think cost of labor is a big factor here. Intel has no trouble maintaining a large enough workforce. They continually decided not to have parallel teams designing processors for their unproven 10nm and their successful 14nm nodes (or one team making a relatively portable design), even years after it was clear that 10nm was not going to work out as well as needed by their processor design roadmap. That wasn't for lack of staffing or inability to afford enough engineers. It was management hubris. (On the other hand, I've often pointed out that Intel's attempts to develop two microarchitectures in parallel have always failed in the long run, with one project ending up woefully uncompetitive.)