The legend of "x86 CPUs decode instructions into RISC form internally" - Fanael's random ruminations

There is a widespread idea that modern high-performance x86 processors work by decoding the "complex" x86 instructions into "simple" RISC-like instructions that the rest of the pipeline then operates on. But how close is this idea to how the processors actually work internally? To answer this question, let's analyze how different x86 processors, ranging from the first "modern" Intel microarchitect