They had built way too much capacity during the 90s and were losing money on every chip because they couldn’t run the fabs at full capacity. That’s why they colluded to increase the price to save their collective hides.
A new competitor wouldn’t be able to enter the market and lower the prices without also losing money. That’s not the case today, the Chinese are trying hard to do just that.
From what I have seen, it cannot. It has become foundational the same way Internet 1.0 (eg. Email, Static HTML, Web Directories, SSL) became foundational for a significant portion of the global economy in the 1990s and 2000s.
It's a bit like the Sun/etc workstation market vs PCs, and high end expensive PCs vs cheap ones. Once the cheap PCs became "good enough" then they naturally dominated.