I think the problem is in understanding English. ROI is not return "OF" your investment, it is return "ON" your investment! Huge difference.
EXACTLY.
ROI is return ON your investment, and thus means
the gains you get from an investment.
If you invest 10BTC on a miner and you get 10BTC back, you got
NO ROI, you just reached the break-even point. ROI is everything that comes
AFTER that point (or, if you lost money, it's the amount of money you lost in relation to your investment - that's NEGATIVE ROI, which is also possible). That's what ROI means in ALL the word, but in this forum somebody started to use it as a synonym of break-even, and everybody followed... Which is fun and ludicrous at the same time.
When you are doing a profit&loss for your company, or for a specific operation, in your excel you will have two very clear and different things: BEP (break even point) and ROI (which is usually expressed as a percentage). So, when people here writes "you won't even reach ROI", in reality they mean "you won't even reach break even".
If you got a positive ROI, you got profit. If you got a negative ROI, you lost money. If you didn't get any ROI, you have recouped all your investment and thus reached break-even.
EDIT: as Death&Taxes just wrote, this is a very basic financial concept... But I guess 99% of BTC miners don't know sh*t about finances, and that's why they rush to preorder miners from which they will get a negative ROI