Well, Intel was kind of in the dumps because their process fell behind. They didn't bet on EUV and got leapfrogged by TSMC and Samsung who did use ASML's EUV technology.
They eventually got on the EUV train and were the first customer to receive ASML's current state of the art machine which they call high-NA EUV. Intel's 18A process is the first to use this machine as part of the manufacturing process, Panther Lake uses this process so now they're right back to being SOTA.
All the news about them (stock price movements, theories about them going bankrupt, Panther Lake, etc...) for the last 2 years has essentially been people betting on whether or not they can successfully incorporate SOTA ASML machines into their manufacturing.
Apple Silicon had a process node advantage over the Core 100 and 200 series due to having a better allocation with TSMC.
Now Intel's process node is also SOTA and on par with TSMC 2nm so they should be more or less equivalent and the only differences down to what set of compromises they make in the design of the chips.