Those did involve ex-Apple people, and there isn't proof that they are quite as good either, but they are the closest that anyone has publicly come.

Qualcomm have never actually caught up with Apple performance wise since the introduction of Arm64. They had a very nice 32 bit implementation and were completely caught off guard. Prior to their NuVia acquisition their 64 bit efforts were barely improvements on what you can just license from Arm directly, to the point for a while that is all they were.