I searched on "Moore's law is not a law" and found [1], "Moore’s Law Is Not Really A Law But It Is Still Obeyed", from someone who was a semiconductor engineer at Intel 40 years ago. As he says, Moore's law was more a roadmap than a law. Companies strove to keep it going for fear their competitors would succeed while they failed; sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[1] https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/moores-law-is-not-real...