There was never any "mining for massive profit. That is just a legend. Mining has never been more than slightly profitable.
I was thinking of those days where you can still mine with CPU. Let's not look back too far into the past... Even if someone mined bitcoins with a mid to highend GPU back in early 2013, and sold bitcoin at the peak. You can expect over 200% profit. Quite massive compared to the profit nowadays.
I agree that this has now evolved into a legend for new hopeful miners.