The fact is cloud mining these days is just an obvious scam but as for regular mining especially for solo miners it's not actually profitable to a certain extent because of the competition for hash rate based on the current difficulty of the network. The same hash rate most solo miners generate now that isn't even enough to catch and validate transactions is the same hash rate that was capable of mining hundreds of Bitcoin back in 2009.

From my experience so far I have come to understand that most miners are just decentralization enthusiasts trying to support the network by running nodes and hoping to be lucky to catch a block reward one day. We've seen a couple of cases where solo miner luckily hit the block reward even in recent times. The probability is very thin but for a decentralization enthusiasts it's worth trying.