Staking pool or outright staking? Lots of people mined before the hardware got sophisticated enough to price out the smaller miners. Even so, there were still people mining on GPUs. Do you remember when gamers and ML researchers were priced out of GPUs?

I was a miner and you only have 56 friends... so would you like 57? =)

Haha we would need to meet in person for that to invalidate my previous statement!