we all make the miners rich, but damn, they put up so many cpu/gpus, it's impossible to compete with this.
Mining is a tough competitive business with margins that are often very thin (though of course higher during periods of rapid growth). Miners earn their money.
Cloud mining is usually a scam, but I wonder if it wouldn't be easy money to rent CPU power if XMR moons (goes up 10x) during its high-inflation period (within the next 1-2 years)?
What usually happens when a CPU mined coin moons is that rental CPU power quickly becomes less available and more expensive. I've seen times in the past when high power servers quickly sell out at many cloud computing vendors. (I've wondered how this looks to people outside of the cryptocoin market who I guess have no idea why all of the sudden everyone wants 1000 Xeon servers.) Money can be made by knowing the best ways to get CPU inexpensively in a tight market but again miners are earning their money, especially if you want to do this at significant scale.