Exactly. And a drop in hash power and difficulty, which have a lag between one and the other, enables miners with more expensive operations to enter. Of course, they suffer when the reverse happens..but such is life.
It was interesting when Monero did their first hard fork for "ASIC resistance" reasons.
I happened to be paying attention that day, and there was a brief period where the network was small because everyone's miners couldn't participate until they were updated. My little single-GPU miner was suddenly rather effective because I had it back up immediately while the difficulty was very low. These days I don't bother turning it on, but when the scheduled forks occur there's probably still some opportunity for the little guys.
I happened to be paying attention that day, and there was a brief period where the network was small because everyone's miners couldn't participate until they were updated. My little single-GPU miner was suddenly rather effective because I had it back up immediately while the difficulty was very low. These days I don't bother turning it on, but when the scheduled forks occur there's probably still some opportunity for the little guys.