I have been mining myself for a couple of years and I am regularly in touch with other miners who have started with me or later and who have been mining before me. Yes they always complain that mining is not profitable. They are hardly been able to recover their mining rig setup expense. What they are doing is they they take big loans with huge interest or they spend whatever they have buying expensive GPUs, motherboards and accessories. They mine precious cryptos and sell them as soon as mined in small amounts with hefty fees to bail out their loans or mortgages. On other hand myself blessed by a sound financial background started as a hobby, I invested a couple of years ago with a small amount of money which I could afford to loose and not to repay anyone if I gain or loose. I kept on mining and accumulating all the precious cryptos I mined. I transferred some to Bittrex, Binance and other trading exchanges and traded with all sorts of altcoins. Sometime I gained and sometime lost. Whenever I gained I converted to BTC and I HODLed. Last year December I sold most of my fortune and my figures were 20 times the amount I invested.
My first 6 GPU mining rig ... still mining precious cryptos.