Yet it's royalty-free and good enough for Espressif (maker of ESP32) to move exclusively to the RISC V open-source instruction set architecture [1].
"Good enough ISA plus zero licensing cost" beats "perfect ISA plus royalties" in the embedded space.
Also, let's not forget that the reason the world is built on the von Neumann architecture is that it was made available for free.
[1] - https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/espressif-moves-exclusively-...
Why didn't they make their own ISA long ago? Then they could have zero royalties. AFAIK ESP8266 was already its own architecture.
ESP8266 uses an Xtensa CPU like the ESP32 (just a non-customizable preset)