Is there synthesis software out there that'll take Verilog or other HDL and generate a netlist of 7400-series logic?
To carry things one step further, if you were seriously contemplating such a thing, of course you'd want the software to understand that chips and boards are of finite sizes, that propagation delays between chips and boards exist, and that board-board connections have finite numbers of pins.
So -- has it been done, perhaps by someone with way too much time on their hands? How big is an ARM M1 core when it's implemented in discrete logic chips that are currently available in the DigiKey catalog? And how fast?