There's a dimension to this people wilfully ignore: the AArch64 design is inspired, especially if you have a team as good as Apple have to execute an implementation of it. And that isn't a one way causality because AArch64 is what it is because of things that the Apple team wanted to do, which has led to their performance advantages today.

I don't think many people have appreciated just how big a change the 64 bit Arm was, to the point it's basically a completely different beast than what came before.

From the moment the iPhone went 64 bit it was clear this was the plan the whole time.