But the thing is, I think in the entire history of Bitcoin, it usually never really made too much sense to mine it, because the price was about the same, so you could just buy it instead.

Think about the times close to Genesis, where you could easily mine it with a CPU, sure, you might get 50 BTC every 10 minutes, but your computer would be running hot and the fans would be very noisy, and in exchange you got something that was valued at basically zero.

Then primitive exchanges started, where they first priced Bitcoin based on the electricity needed to CPU mine them. Again, you would be better off just buying it, since you would skip the hot and noise part.

And now it's basically the same, just at a much larger scale.