I think that's a charitable way to say that Intel has had the technology for years to give us more than 4 cores on the mainstream platform, but as the abusive monopolist they are, they chose to instead milk the market for profits, over the advancement of civilization.
Don't characterize corporations as Good vs Evil. Corporations only exist to make money. They don't exist to give you what you want for a good price, especially when you are in a niche of the market.
It's not bad intent that had us stay on quad cores. It's reasonable use of resources.
Even today quad cores are overkill for the average user. The kind of software that benefits from even more cores, is limited to some kind of rendering. Which means that for most people, extra cores are just idling most of the time.
In the past couple of CPU generations, Intel arguably put it's transistor budget into a more beneficial target. Improving the iGPU. A few generations back, Intel iGPUs were a bad joke. Today they are quite reasonable. This is much more beneficial to larger range of people, than driving up core counts that only niche have a use for.
On top of that, all available evidence, indicates that Intel was going to boost core count with the next big increase in transistor budge (10nm). It looks like Cannon lake desktop would have arrived with up to 8 cores in the mainstream. But 10nm proved more difficult to implement and is late.
So next we get Coffee lake. Stuck at 14nm, we only get 6 cores + iGPU, to hold us over until 10nm brings the possability of 8 cores + iGPU.
AMD made a great move with Ryzen, they shipped a 8 core part on 14nm, by skipping the iGPU/APU, so this let them hold a core count advantage over Intel without building a huge die. Very good strategy to strike where Intel wasn't. But their APU will be back to 4 cores for similar reasons to Intel giving us 4 cores in it's mainstream parts.
They each want to benefit from the economics of relatively small dies for their mainstream parts, and until the next process shrink, we won't see 8 cores + IGP/APU.