IMO, the article title is a little click-baity.
Modern x86 is broken down into RISC-like micro-ops by the decoder. The ARM solution was to just use the Zen design with an ARM decoder. AMD still could do this today…
https://wccftech.com/legendary-chip-architect-jim-keller-say…
During his time at AMD, Jim and his team noticed that the cache design for ARM and x86 CPU was mostly the same among other things such as the execution unit and the only difference between the two processor architectures was the decode unit so they decided to work on a new chip, known to us as K12 that was later canceled by AMD.