Aren't ASIC miners at least an order (or in the case of Bitcoin, several orders) of magnitude more efficient than these chips? Is this just more attractive in terms of more easily accessible supply?
Many people in the community don’t like ASICs in crypto because they believe their high cost and rarity creates a hurdle for mass adoption. Every kid playing games on their computer has a GPU, but it’s much harder for that same kid to get their hands in an ASIC. Mass adoption by all kinds of people, not just already rich corporations, is important to the security and the mission of crypto.
In response, Ethereum was designed to have an algo that stresses your RAM rather than your processor. This reduces the advantage of ASICs tremendously. You can’t drive RAM much harder than GPUs already do. And so, Eth and many other memory-hard cryptos are still mined on GPUs.