What you said. The miners were making record profits in March-April due to the atrocious gas prices. Gas fees on top of block rewards are what got the rewards so high.
In the last week the gas has been the lowest in quite some time. Lows of 20-40 gwei on weekdays!
See for yourself:
https://www.gasnow.org/I see 2 reasons for the low gas fees and ipso facto “downed” block rewards:
1. Sidechains or alternate chains like Polygon or BSC picking steam until the Ethereum chain sorts things out
2. Ethereum in its current bullrun is too valuable to be wasted on fees of a contract where the monthly returns were equal to deposit+withdrawal gas fees. People find it better to hold the coin instead of losing 0.05 ETH fees interacting with a contract that gives 0.5% APR per month
but if you are mining for fiat or btc you are getting more than 10 cents a mh due to price rise.
It is how you look at it when you cash out, I guess - per diem. But going by OP’s data close to ~61TH/s was added between the 2 days. As long as we used the game sample space during these periods and there were no major shifts to any outliers, we could say it gives a true picture of closed ecosystem. Now we know the block rewards and no. of blocks, so the other major parameters are the gas fees paid and no. of transactions.
With fees down and congestion low, a good piece of the pie goes missing. You could say this resembles a taste of what miners have to live with after EIP1559. This is why they complain.
19th AprilETH price: $2,166.19
Avg. gas: 195.80 gwei
Rewards (OP data): 28220 ETH = $61.13M
2nd MayETH price: $2,952.06
Avg. gas: 43.10
Rewards (OP data): 16719 ETH = $49.35M