CUDA was built during the time AMD was focusing every resource on becoming competitive in the CPU market again. Today they dominate the CPU industry - but CUDA was first to market and therefore there's a ton of inertia behind it. Even if ROCm gets very good, it'll still struggle to overcome the vast amount of support (read "moat") CUDA enjoys.

yeah it's a very frustrating situation.

according to public information NVIDIA started working on CUDA in 2004, that was before AMD made the ATI acquisition.

my suspicion is that back then ATI and NVIDIA had very different orientations. neither AMD nor ATI were ever really that serious about software. so in that sense i guess it was a match made in heaven.

so you have a cultural problem, which is bad enough, then you add in the lean years AMD spent in survival mode. forget growing software team, they had to cling on to fewer people just to get through.

now they're playing catch-up in a cutthroat market that's moving at light speed compared to 20 years ago.

we're talking about a major fumble here so it's easy to lose context and misunderstand things were a little more complex than they appeared.