I agree with the rest of your message here; that the e-cores have a misunderstood place, but this part seems like a selective take for two reasons.
The first is that AMD and Intel both do different things, and often in response to what the other does, so which is "first" or "second" is often a bit less clear. It seems like a pointless remark to make, but even if you want to, I'm not sure I see all these AMD tardy scenarios in the consumer x86 space anyway? The first to 1 GHz? The first 64-bit? The first multi-core? The first to move the IMC to the CPU? The first non-monolithic? The first stacked cache? The first mixed process node sizes (yes, Intel's going to do that too so the jab at AMD being "cheap" for this is a case of "well, about that..."). Besides the final few, I seem to recall AMD doing all those first and then Intel doing them too. And for the final few, AMD did non-monolithic and stacked cache first and Intel is finally about to do one, and then the other. It's ultimately a silly discussion to have, but even if you want to have it, AMD isn't the constant tardy party anyway.
The second it's a selective comment is because in this particular situation, AMD was "second" insofar as they had no need for lesser cores like Intel does to begin with. Intel was fine selling the same moderately improved quad core for over a dozen generations. They put out a six core, Hyper-threaded product as early as LGA 1366 while most consumers were on LGA 775 on single or dual cores only, yet the consumer landscape only got quad cores all the way through the 7th generation. Ryzen came, and then when it got decent per core performance, Intel was suddenly facing down more scenarios where they were losing (first in multi-threaded, but then the gap was closing in single-threaded too once Zen 2 launched and then Zen3 surpassed them entirely). Intel then had to respond, and this explains the timely increase of the 8th, then 9th, to finally 10th generations in core/thread counts. All in response to Ryzen. Then when Zen 2 doubled core counts again, Intel couldn't match it with its current cores at all because power and thermal demands would be way too high. We even saw the Core i9 lose cores going from 10th to 11th generation. Their answer was e-cores, and yes it's a fine answer, but pretending like this is some "usual Intel first" when it came in response to AMD being ahead in core count and Intel being totally unable to match them is a very peculiar way to look at it.
AMD's ZenC cores isn't quite the same as what Intel is doing anyway. Intel's p-cores and e-cores cores are actually different entirely. AMD's ZenC cores are actually just regular cores, just the opposite direction of what their v-cache approach is. That is, they are still the same as whatever their usual core is architecturally but have less (lower level) cache instead of having more of it. The end goal is the same as what Intel's hybrid approach is after though, yes. The intent with a lesser core that comes with space savings is that for things that don't lose performance from what the core skips out on (in the case of ZenC cores, this is less cache), you "get more performance out of the same potential die space". Because that right there is what it ultimately boils down to now. They're both doing it different ways, and much of what each of them do is in response to what the other is doing, sometimes in non-traditional ways. Seeing that as "AMD is late as usual" isn't even historically accurate.
