The short answer to your last part is that they all expected worse. And things are expected to improve from here. In particular, the stuffed channels are clearing up so it is expected that Intel will soon again match the sell-through, which should be healthy sales. Despite the big correction after the pandemic demand, they still expect the PC market to be around 270 million units for the full year, which is not bad at all. Similarly, they expect data centre to improve, with demand returning in China, in particular. Second half of the year is also traditionally cyclically up.
The bigger story is that Gelsinger is executing relentlessly on his plan to make Intel a player in the foundry space, while seemingly improving product roadmap execution. In particular, Ann Kelleher seems to have executed the new process roadmap well, which by all accounts is now on track. So there is optimism that Intel will make a major comeback in process technology. They may indeed achieve their goal of having density and performance per watt leadership with their RibbonFET transistor and backside power delivery technology by 2025. It is going to be exciting to see how it turns out.
What is lacking though on these earnings calls is probing on the competitive position on current and upcoming products. For example, when they claim market share gains, I presume they mean in units, not revenue. It would be nice if they clarified. AMD has all but abandoned the low end in the PC space, so Intel is serving that end of the market now. Similarly in the data centre, I presume EPYC is commanding a better price than Xeon at the moment. I suspect AMD will continue to erode Intel's revenue share in both the PC and data centre segments. Then there is the GPU and AI offerings. As you pointed out, an analyst had a probing question about the latter (the Gaudi chip), which reminded me about similar questions fielded to AMD's Lisa Su about the progress of their Instinct server GPU, which she has answered in a similar fashion ("not yet material", "early days", "a journey", as she likes to put it). Likewise, I think Gelsinger answered that question nicely and honestly.
On your first point, why analysts on these calls do not field tougher and more critical questions, the answer is that they may be frozen out of future calls! For instance, Bernstein's Stacy Rasgon has not been allowed to ask a question at Intel's earnings calls for a couple of quarters now. Here he is with his analysis of the earnings release: