some additional thoughts:

i think that, for digital design to be interesting, the cost of entry must be lowered by probably orders upon orders of magnitude.

the google skywaterpdk thing, whatever it is (or was?), did produce a great deal of hobbyist designs and proved that there really isn't anything special about rtl - infact, its really quite monotonous and boring.

which is a good attitude to have, really. lots of hobbyist designs got cranked out quickly on what, as i understood, was a very obsolete pdk from two decades ago.

but its fundamentally still too expensive and too limited. open source software 'blew up' because

1. the cost of entry was free...

2. ...for state of the art tools.

its not enough to be free, or open source. it also has to be competitive. llvm/gcc won the compiler world because they blew the codegen of proprietary compilers out of the water, ofcourse being open source it became a positive feedback loop of lots of expert eyeballs -> better compiler -> more experts look at it -> better compiler -> ...

for digital design to become interesting, you can't trick the kids: they want the same tech the 'big boys' are using. so, what scope is there to make it economical for someone like Intel carving out some space for a no-strings-attached digital design lottery?

i get the impression that, unlike for most manufacturing processes, the costs of silicon digital electronics increases every year, and the amortisation schedule becomes bigger, not smaller.

so if anything, it seems that the more high tech silicon manufacturing becomes, the smaller the pool of players (who have the ever-increasing capital expenditure necessary) becomes, which should indicate that the opportunities for digital design work are actually going to be shrinking as time goes on.