As someone else may have already pointed out (I was too lazy to read more than the OP), mining has been declared dead so many times before and not just in 2018. I remember people saying that ETH mining would be dead by design (switched to POS) by now ages ago.

I have been mining for quite a while and I have seen this declaration over and over.

It's dead if you are narrow minded, ignorant, lazy or stupid. If however you can read, have some technical skills and a willingness to research and experiment can usually make at least a small daily profit. That's if you only mine for daily profit and you sell out to bitcoin or (worse) FIAT currency often.

If you have the patience to HODL you can get lucky. I wish I had read this advice and paid attention to it in early 2017. I would have made at least $200K.

There are some great projects out there with really interesting and innovative ideas behind them - especially amongst the various coins that use variants of the cryptonight algorithm.

Of course about 90% of coins are either scams or will never really take off, but part of the fun of this hobby (if it is a business to you I pity you) is picking the good ones.