x86 doesn't have any of the stuff that's hostile to high performance, it was perfectly positioned (to be clear, this was pure luck) to exploit the evolution of superscalar, out-of-order processors.
OTHER than the ridiculous instruction decoding, which is still today very slow for cold code on even the newest x86 cores.
Once you've decoded the crazy x86 instructions into µops in the µop cache then, yes, it avoided the worst CISC mistakes of multiple memory accesses (and potential page faults) in one instruction via having only one memory operand per instruction and not having indirect addressing.
It has a couple of them. Flag registers, global rounding modes, relatively small page size, strong memory ordering guarantees, complicated decoding (and I'm sure there are a few more). It's more that it was good enough and managed to sufficiently mitigate most of the problems pretty well.
I think x86 would have been long dead if it weren’t chosen for the IBM PC or if it weren’t married to Intel. The former guaranteed it customers, the latter superior manufacturing technology.
