Thank you for this post, I now understand your arguments better.

Basically so your point is that in the last halvings the profitability was much higher than now and miners had margin to "manage" the halvings with minor adjustments to the business model, While now the margins for miners are much thinner, so with every income problem (like halvings or price crashes) there's danger to lose larger parts of the hashrate without immediate recovery. So it's basically what I meant with the "inflated" hashrate.

I still don't see this as critical for Bitcoin's wellbeing / security, at least not in the short/mid term.

If the assumption is true, then the mining market was never really mature: Until 2021 we may had seen a market with lower supply than the optimum (and thus high profitability margins). It's possible according what I read in the forum and other communities that this was mainly caused by hardware shortage - there were less gears available than people willing to mine. And according to this assumption, we are now in a phase with a higher supply (of hashrate) than the optimum, with several miners mining at a loss.

The consequences would be that we could se a sharper hashrate drop, but in general this would mean that the market would be maturing and that would be in general favourable for Bitcoin because if we see really a major hashrate drop this year, this will probably not happen again then so easy and the curves would become smooth again. Miner diversification into housing / AI / HPC is a sign of that business models are evolving to more sustainable ones.

The problem that halvings are still a reduction of security vs. market cap of course remains, I never disputed that. This is of course also the root of the big block/small block debate or of ideas like "Bitcoin should go PoS" or "tail emissions". My argument is that if nothing changes, we could lose 40-45% attack cost vs. market cap in this halving, the next time it will be closer to 30-40%, then 20-30% and so on because fees will make up a larger portion of the income even if the fees in USD stay constant.

But we could improve that equation with models like merged mined sidechains (higher throughput for the same fee level -> slightly higher cost for miners but much larger attractivity for users -> higher usage -> higher price -> higher overall security).