So in my mind, it likely played out like this.
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When exactly did Apple "write off the Pro market?"
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About 6 months after the release of the new Mac Pro, where they had no roadmap/plan towards upgrades of the chipset/GPUs in the Mac Pro. When you're talking about the Pro market, you need to update the hardware in your product. When you haven't updated said hardware for 3+ years, you've clearly written off that market segment, or you'd have done something to the internals in that time frame.
There were quite a few articles coming out of Apple/tech press saying that the Desktop group had lost a lot of sway in the new Apple. That was also part of their abandoning the pro market.
http://bgr.com/2017/04/07/mac-pro-release-date-2019/
According to that article, the decision to resurrect the "Mac Pro" came about after their new Pro laptop line didn't perform as well as they'd hoped, so the decision to 'fix' the Mac Pro seems recent, not like some brilliant secret strategy to let your flagship desktop languish for years only to reveal something great after your Pro client have left the platform.
Again, all signs point to Apple abandoning the dedicated desktop. Why bother when they think everything is going mobile anyway. Sure, they're all over the Pro laptop market, but we're talking about the Mac Pro, not the MBP.
Didn't Apple also pretty much screw the pooch in this same timeframe with regards to various Pro software packages?
No, I see Apple's recent excuses as just that, excuses, not the reality. I can't believe that if Apple had dedicated any serious time/brain power to putting more powerful components in the same case/design, they couldn't have done it.
They chose not to.
They recently changed their mind, but don't have the stones to say they were planning on leaving the desktop market, so blamed it on technical limitations instead.