A difference of 40x is huge.
Say you had 40 people hashing then it could match the output of a single ASIC, true, but the mining reward for the individual will be reduced by the same 40x. This likely makes it not worth doing because the cost of electricity then outweighs the rewards.
Similar to how you can still technically mine Zcash now with your GPU, … and since we’re wandering down rabbit holes 
----- warning long boring calculation------
If the old EWBF cuda code was dusted off and updated then you could run it on your old Nvidia 1080 GPU and mine a whopping 465 Sols/s at a cost of 165 Watts.
So that’s: 465 Sols /165W = 2.8 Sols per Watt
In todays Zcash that GPU will make 0.00018 ZEC per day, so in a solid year of mining you would earn 0.0657 ZEC.
So GPU mining for 365 days (at $23 per ZEC) you earn $1.20 in ZEC while your electric (at $0.11kW) cost you ~ $159
—end—
True, the ratio isn’t as bad for a RandomX CPU vs ASIC as it is for a GPU vs ASIC in Zcash, but the end result is the same: any algorithm that has a factor of 10x or more disadvantage to an ASIC is very bad for individual hobby miners, but good for ASIC mining farms that have scale and cheap electricity.
Which brings me back to what I mentioned before:
The 3x disadvantage is the reason GPU miners were viable/profitable for ETH until it moved to PoS. By tweaking the power consumption/hashrate settings (depending on firmware/card) ETH miners were able to further reduce the disadvantage to about 2-2.5x.