Yes, bitcoin mining has long been unprofitable on GPUs and is low-profit with ASICs. But most newer cryptocurrencies are designed specifically to be hard to make affordable ASICs for, usually by requiring GPU-like memory bandwidth. If you participate in a mining pool like NiceHash, your GPU will likely end up being put to work mining something like Monero but the pool will pay out in bitcoin.

For casual miners, they can use mining pools to make money that still pay pretty well. Gamers especially, are buying these cards and then joining a mining pool when not playing games to recoup some of their money.

This unfortunately leads to a cycle of more mining, even if the card isn’t optimized for it, as no card is a net negative cash flow atm even factoring in energy costs.