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Notes -
Unsure if you are talking about the manufacturers of PCs or the enthusiast.
All the same, I do miss the days when the various manufacturers had more interoperability. Now you pick and AMD or Intel processor, and they must use a small range of AMD or Intel motherboard chipsets. It's all very homogenized.
I think the peak of enthusiast computer building was probably Socket 7. You had chipsets from Intel, ALi, SiS or VIA. You could use CPUs from Intel, AMD, Cyrix and a few other also rans. You could do all sorts of goofy stuff with clock multipliers and the front side bus. I'm still running a Pentium 233 MMX at 2.5 x 100 instead of 3.5 x 66.
You still had a plethora of motherboard chipset manufacturers for a while even after that. Nvidia got in the game for a hot minute. I'm not sure who hung on longest? Maybe VIA? I see they kept plugging along with Intel until the P4 era, and then AMD until AM2.
None the less it's all pretty boring now. You pick AMD or Intel, then throw the whole damned thing away in 3 or 4 years for a new socket. And often not because new hardware has really gotten all that better, but because Windows has gotten so shit it's slowed your PC to a crawl.
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