Is it too cynical to assert that this was the actual intent?

It was the intent of DEC and HP insofar as they joined the Itanium programme and EOL'd their own designs.

DEC was part of HP at that point, so it was the HP leadership that made the decision to ditch Alpha.

Compaq bought DEC and killed Alpha before both got folded into HP.

Alpha was the reason DEC was for sale. It was a very cool speedy architecture, but it took too long to emerge from the DEC management swamp.

Bitsavers has a series of memos showing how the Alpha predecessor Prism went down in flames when DEC decided to quick-fix its technology hole with MIPS.

Alpha was a kind of illicit skunk works leftover from that failed project. If DEC had pushed it out the door a couple of years earlier - not likely, but possible with a push - it might have eaten the rest of the industry.

I suspect that whatever the virtues of the Alpha architecture [1], DEC simply didn't have the muscle to stay in the game with exponentially increasing R&D costs.

[1] And it's not like Alpha was some shining beauty of ISA design either. Early versions lacking sub-word load/store, the absolutely crazy memory consistency model, ...

Wasn't the byte stuff due to patent kerfuffle with MIPS?

AFAIK, yes.

and MIPS, as a server architecture. In 1998, MIPS Technologies left SGI. Without a major systems house using it, MIPS was left to chase embedded markets. The R10000 had been used by SGI, Tandem, Pyramid, and NEC for high-end servers.