The truth is that even when it was very profitable to mine, it would often have been more profitable to buy the coins at the speculative, low price and hold anyway. You could have bought a ton of bitcoin with the 2010-2012 prices instead of setting up mining rigs.

You can find calculators online to determine the most profitable coin to mine at any time, but since everyone is looking for that, it changes a lot and you have to manage a lot of different wallets and software. It's probably not a good use of time unless you are already familiar with some of the processes.

It can certainly be profitable though.