Is mining cryptos small scale worth it?

I had a conversation with one of my friends about investing in some mining rigs and their feasibility.
Last year was the ICO of giga-watt and I was very exited because I thought that there was my chance to get in this domain. They had the infrastructure, the know how and best of all they sold Antminers A9 at decent price not like on amazon or ebay.
The wtt token gives you 50 years rent free access for 1 watt of mining power in their location, you only pay electricity.
It was an ICO spread over a few month and at some point the started to change the initial conditions. In the beginning you could just choose to buy the miners and pay rent on a monthly basis but later on after they noticed that their tokens wouldn't sell, because you'd literally pay the rent in advance for 50 years , they changed the rules and said that only token owners can buy mining rigs. That was it for me. I had to make other plans if I wanted to follow up on having my on mining farm. I signed up with the Bitmain's news letter and hoped to be among the first ones to place an order when they'd release a new batch. Tough luck again, most of the time they have minimum order of 50 pcs. or the website just wouldn't work. So here I am thinking that maybe it was for the best that I couldn't get in last year. Looking back I think owning the cryptos yielded more return rather than buying the mining rigs considering continuously increase of mining dificulty .
I think the best and last time for small investors to get into mining cryptos was 2016-2017.