I think you maybe just trying to convince yourself that something that isn't viable somehow is.

The costs you cite are not even scaled with price. At $500 Dash, weekly margin over cost for a node is about 99% given a hosting cost of 30$ per month (which is already about 2 times what I pay).

That isn't sustainable. The conditions now are nothing like the conditions in 2017. We received a massive pump from hedging the impending bitcoin fork at that time. Bitcoin had never been forked before - there was no BCash or BSV. There were almost no stablecoins which are now prolific and efficient to be used as payment mediums. There were far fewer competing investable assets.

The 2017 pump lead bitcoin's peak by around 10 months. So if you're looking for an echo of it then this was it - we already had it: