Its not like intel never had gpu drivers (they have had igpus for ever), they just never had to constantly need to update them for the gaming audience.
Lets not pretend features like intels quicksync that came out on sandy bridge igpus to do video encoding didnt reshape how companies did encoding for viewing(which would lead to NVenc or AMD VCE) or scrubbing in the case of professional use.
The gpu driver team had existed for awhile now, its just they never was seveeely pressured to update it specifically for gaming as theybreally didnt have anything remotely game ready till arguably tigerlake’s igpu.