The HPC codes I worked on we would compile with gcc, clang, icc and whatever vendor compiler was installed (Cray, PGI, something even worse). Then we'd benchmark the resulting binaries and make a recommendation based on speed. (Assuming the compiled binaries gave the correct results, which would sometimes fail and trigger further debugging to find out if we had undefined behaviors (or implementation defined) or had managed to find a compiler bug. For codes that are memory-bandwidth dominated the results are pretty much a toss-up. For compute bound codes intel would often win.
You can do the same when your machine has non-intel CPUs that are supported by a lot of compilers. If you are on power9 or arm the compiler list gets shorter. And a lot of supercomputers start to contain accelerators (often, but not always Nvidia GPUs) in which case there is often only one supported compiler and you have to rewrite code until that compiler is happy and produces fast code.
You can do the same when your machine has non-intel CPUs that are supported by a lot of compilers. If you are on power9 or arm the compiler list gets shorter. And a lot of supercomputers start to contain accelerators (often, but not always Nvidia GPUs) in which case there is often only one supported compiler and you have to rewrite code until that compiler is happy and produces fast code.