It's more likely they're just partially shutting down some of their modem development and focusing on beyond 5G, since people really have no idea how many years something like this can actually take, they might not expect it to be ready until 6G rolls around in 2030. iPhones themselves are usually finalized 2-3 years before they are even announced, we weren't going to see anything until 2027 at the earliest anyways.
Regardless, there's no way Apple is going to bend over for Qualcomm forever. Modems are hard but if they were able to walk away from Intel+Nvidia, they can probably do this.