Mining on GPUs was never very profitable unless you held the mined coins for years. I suspect it still is profitable if you are in a position to do that, but the entire endeavor seems extremely risky since the valuation increases are not guaranteed.

Which didn't stop people gobbling up every available gpu in the late 2010's.

(Which, in my opinion, was a contributing factor why VR pc gaming didn't take of when better VR headsets arrived just around that point.)

> Mining on GPUs was never very profitable unless you held the mined coins for years.

If mining is only profitable after holding, it wasn't profitable. Because then you could have spent less money to just buy the coins instead of mining them yourself, and held them afterwards.