Cloud mining is an industry that people should stop looking at. Mainly because of the many scam sites with unrealistic return offers and their nonsense life term contracts.
Putting the fact that the far majority of the cloud mining sites are a scam aside, I must also note that investing in legit cloud mining sites is also something you should avoid.
It's far from profitable due to the block halving and the constantly increasing difficulty, and thus you are wasting your time and money if you proceed to invest anyway. But then again, people are free to choose.
Cloud mining sites that you call legit may very well be the same scams that you so carelessly put aside, maybe a little less greedy, or a little more insidious and nefarious if you please. Instead of openly stealing all the money of buyers of their alleged mining power, they steal only a small part of investments making it look exactly like you described, i.e. "far from profitable due to the block halving and the constantly increasing difficulty"...
When, in fact, they might be doing basically the same that outright scams do, i.e. steal their clients money