A tiny amount of die area, a huge amount of engineering and validation effort. If segmentation issues can cause the register renamer to lose track of who owns a physical register that's the sort of issue that's terrible to find and debug but which also can't be allowed in a real device. Intel has traditionally been able to just throw more engineers at the problem than their competitors, but I"m not sure that'll be the case going forwards.

Mainline OS's have been 64bit for about 15-20 years by this point, the point is to trim parts of X86 that isn't used when running a 64bit OS.

Notice that only 32bit kernel/R-0 is removed, but not usermode/R-3 so even when reducing this your 64bit Windows will still run clean 32bit software built for Win95 from the 90s.

Even today you need to run a virtualized 32bit OS to run old 16bit software (the negative part is if you still run a virtualized 32bit OS then it'll need to be emulated instead of HW virtualized if the virtualization solutions allowed that).

> Intel apparently forgot what made them worth choosing over competitors like ARM

People (myself and others I know) choose ARM chips because they don't absolutely mandate the purchase of sanctioned chipsets/other supporting components you don't have access to, impossible-to-obtain specs, etc.