I wasn't in the room, I was only an intern at the time, but I worked with engineers who were. They literally had an ugly beige Dell machine with the OS running. Although I can't seem to find any article backing this up, it was wildly believed internally that Avie and Rubinstein left because they didn't agree with the change. Avie for sure was quoted as saying the PowerPC made the Mac special.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/tevanian-rubinstein-leave-appl...

Rosetta was the missing piece Apple needed to make the transition viable.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140714174257/http://news.cnet....