At the true bottom of the bear market, even if you got cheap or free power, most of you will not bother to mine at all.
In 2019 when ETH was $100, the rx580 made about $0.20 a day in profit with 10 cents electrical it made a total of $0.00 in profit.
So even if your power was 5 cents or free, most wouldn’t bother doing this to make a dime a day per GPU. If you really believed in crypto you would just buy it directly instead of mining it.
Estimated rewards in 2019 based on 2mil diff was anywhere from .15-.30 with a small farm of 250mh/s. Purchasing 8x 580/480 at $60-$120 a card. You would have an investment cost of 1K maybe for everything. You would earn 1 eth in about 4-6 days. by years end you would have ended roughly at 50 eth. This is all rough math. Buying about 1k of eth @ 100$ per would fetch you 10 eth.
So what is better? Buying 1k of eth at $100 a coin? Or making roughly .10-.30 eth a day with a small farm?
OP is correct. Mining when diff is down and equipment, difficulty, and interest is low is the best time for miners. This allows for coin accumulation at faster rates. Mining all of 2019 vs buying once, if considering equal capital is applied on both sides, would have been the better choice.
I mined all of 2018, 2019, and 2020. Picked up cards at heavily discounted rates, mined on em for 2-3 years, and sold them for 7-10x of what I purchased them for. Plus, this avoids "on ramps" and "kyc" if you had to use Fiat to purchase the coin.