Well, AMD is not better. Arguably a lot worse. Kind of off topic here though since we have other discussions about Intel ME already where I’ve explained all these things in detail:
The TL;DR is that there are many real-world risks and vulnerabilities which have already been exploited, so not just theoretical, but whether you’re going to be affected… I couldn’t tell you. It’s pretty much only going to be against very at-risk individuals or orgs, typical users probably shouldn’t worry.
Although there are options to reduce your attack surface for current Intel owners, it’s debatable whether you should. I’d never generally recommend disabling Intel ME, which is why that topic isn’t on our site 
The only great way to mitigate the risk is simply to avoid it entirely. Personally, I’ll never buy (and will rarely recommend) an Intel or AMD computer again though. Qualcomm X Elite ARM laptops will be out pretty soon with first-party native Linux support, so I think that’ll probably be the go-to for many people interested in privacy within the next few years. If you’re a Windows or especially macOS user there are already good ARM solutions, so it’s good that Linux is catching up.
I would imagine avoiding Intel and buying ARM will almost certainly be in our hardware recommendations within the next 5 years max, but there simply aren’t really good Linux options today to do so. Obviously we’ll have to test and see if Qualcomm’s solution is actually good when they’re released, I’m just hopeful it will be. If you’re buying a new computer now, I probably wouldn’t sweat it tbh.