When the actual truth is they are sticking with the old thing. Reframed as a choice.
If "Ditching 4f" is such a good idea, why show their hand right before their competitors make the foolish choice of releasing it? Why not hold your cards until afterwards?
Unless perhaps this isn't a brilliant strategy but instead a spin for the investors?
It's a public company that is beholden to the shareholders. They have to explain what they are doing. But I agree with you, seems sus. Even if you can make more money by scaling the old tech today, that does not justify dropping the future innovation. Especially because by all accounts they are swimming in cash... Unless they are telling the truth and 4f extra complexity does not justify extra cost. I really have no context to evaluate that.
Looks like they have mapped the possible paths and consider it a dead end. The density increase is low compared to the effort to process cost, so they just opted for a simpler process with a similar density at a much lower cost per wafer. They might come back to it at some point - they invented it and have substantial IP investment on it.
Also, there might be some cost of opportunity - the AI bubble is now, so anything that diverts from current extremely profitable product lines is a terrible idea. It’s a bubble and they have the fiduciary duty to suck it until it’s dry.
I suspect it is because Micron is a publicly traded company, its management has to answer questions from the investor community.
And because DRAM is a commodity business, profits in the long term are possible even if a company does not win first-to-market profits.
Finally, there is always a market segment that is not betting on the new technology when it is new.
This is not unlike the strategy the US employed to win the space race after they were quite behind in said race. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off! (I'm not confident since I don't find the CEO to be anything more than a margin chaser).