making it completely feasible to mine with consumer level hardware
You're right that it's always been possible to run a regular-guy computer and get
some nonzero amount of XMR out, but the absolute numbers per machine are small and the profitability has been approximately zero for quite some time (though I believe the recent XMR price spike might have brought a few of the fancier Ryzens above the zero mark)
I do mine, but it's absolutely throwing away money on a silly pastime, not a business or investment. The numbers would be even worse if it wasn't on a computer that I'd be leaving on all the time anyway.
What hashrate are you getting, actually?
This guy seems to have put a lot of effort into optimizing his mining efficiency, on a pretty modern consumer CPU, and comes out with about 14kH/s. Some other tinkerers in the comments post their numbers too.
I get about 16kH/s, but the efficiency is most certainly trash compared to these guys.
But you can see that the common thread here is that everyone is cranking down the power to find a range where it's not a massive loss,
and most of them are hobbyists who aren't really counting dollars and cents.
That max-efficiency 14kH/s is worth about $0.47 per day in revenue at today's prices, ignoring all costs.