These sorts of articles always seem suspect to me. Blame the miners is a great trope. There really aren't any valuable crypto's being mined on CPU/GPU any longer. After ETH switched from PoW to PoS, it decimated the whole mining industry. Nothing else has enough volume to really make a huge dent, so the incentive was destroyed. Sure a few people deep into it can make a few grand a day, but this isn't enough to drive a whole market.
Yeah i was wondering about that too. Even small cap PoW chains have dedicated mining hardware that is orders of magnitude faster than a GPU. I guess in theory it could work if you cobbled together enough hacked AWS accounts, but the scale required to make any sort of real profit would be gigantic. It just doesn't seem worthwhile.
Exactly. The problem is volume on exchanges to unload what you've mined. Some of these tokens only have a few thousand a day and any selling risks dumping the entire market. If you can steal the compute, sure, that is one thing, but it is very risky for not a huge payout.