But without them yes they are profitable especially if you're not paying for electricity as in this case.
"ASIC-resistance", in this context, only means that ASICs can be held to a low multiple of CPU/GPU efficiency. So ASICs can be 10x as efficient as a CPU/GPU, but not 10k-1m times as efficient like they can on something like SHA.
Unfortunately, profit trends towards zero (towards cost of production) until prices change, so having a 10x advantage is still actually quite big. That means you're making at least a small profit when everyone else is forced to turn off their rigs.
In practice this means that ASIC-resistance, as a method of decentralizing control of the network, doesn't work. Big farms pay cheaper rates for electricity (in China, sometimes zero, by stealing it or bribing local officials), and have insider access to much more efficient ASIC hardware than the general public does. So when profit declines to zero, they inherit the network by virtue of being the only miners who remain profitable.
However efficient ASICs were able to be constructed for the current (and previous) algorithms.
Monero will make a hardfork, right now actually, to brick the existing ASICs. The new algorithm isn't sufficiently different to prevent them however and we will probably see efficient ASICs in under 6 months.
The long term hope instead lies on a new algorithm[0] which tries to change the POW algorithm all the time. Will it hold up or will someone manage to create efficient ASICs? Your guess is as good as mine.
Now, obviously a rig full of Vega cards put out a lot higher hash rate than an 8C CPU, but the CPU was actually reasonably efficient in terms of wattage. At the time, building quad-CPU rigs on older architectures was actually a reasonably efficient build.
