Your comments about solar water heaters are irrelevant, because people aren't buying them (in the dominant markets). They are therefore inferior in some way (don't work particularly well in built-up cities for example, which is where populations are moving), in the opinion of the people making the purchases. That's the only opinion that matters, not yours.
Solar water heaters have issues. And mining doesn't
You're not getting that nobody is proposing "mining" in anything like the form it is done today, with all of its issues. Embedded deeply into a product (or indeed embedded deeply into a chip which is embedded deeply into a product) it won't be recognizable.