Semantically, sure, they are giving money back but the OP has a reasonable point that a dollar given back today may ultimately cost far more than a dollar in lost future returns.
Management should give money back when they do not think that they can generate future returns with it that are worth more to investors than the money. If management is right, then attempting to keep the money is taking value away from shareholders.
Given my knowledge of Intel's situation, I believe that management is making the right call here. We've known for decades that CISC based architectures don't scale as well. For a long time Intel compensated by investing enough to be able to iterate faster despite their advantages. But now ARM has taken over mobile, and is moving into data centers. Intel lost, they can't invest enough to overcome their innate disadvantages.
This isn't news, but there is a huge chunk of x86 out there. Unfortunately they've lost their moat on that to AMD. AMD now has better designs and more money to put into research. AMD also has outsourced manufacturing to TSMC, which (because they also build lots of ARM devices) has better economies of scale and manufacturing than Intel can hope match. And even if Intel tried to copy AMD here, there is a long learning curve to working with outsourced manufacturing that Intel would have to go through.
The result looks pretty grim. There is not one area in which Intel has an institutional advantage. And there is every reason to believe that Intel is not long for the world. Therefore extracting maximum value from current assets is probably their best management strategy. Rather than engaging in wishful thinking about a return to their former glory.
