or is that the point, like some sort of gamble?
Cloud mining is a pyramid scheme/MLM scheme. So yes it becomes a sort of a gamble and a hype led koolaid crew.
This is enhanced by the fact that these schemes spread on social media and previous faucet sites and google ads (not anymore now) for giving high referral commission and thus more and more people signed up.
The real winners here were the people running the scheme who are the scammers and the social media promoters who promoted them, specially youtubers. They got paid for it and they didnt care about how people lost, they just wanted their money - you see how money can manipulate people to forget their morals?
And the losers were those who got on the hype train, those investing last were the least probable of breaking even because on fine day the site will have shut down and all the money gone into thin air with no legal authority to contact and nobody to run after.
If you talk about accusing the youtubers then they will either claim their disclaimer or say they were also scammed/pull the victim card.