Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not for XMR. There's quite a few altcoins out there aiming to solve the asic problem with aggressively anti-asic algorithms.
There is an interesting position that asic mining is the most democratic and decentralized way. The easier and simpler and cheaper a miner is to produce, the more accessible it is and likely that companies can manufacture and distribute it, turning it into a commodity. Complex proofs that require cpu's, for example, hand a permanent monopoly to Intel and friends. When the nanometer race ends in a few product generati…
Once they have the next generation off the production line, they take the used previous generation, box them up and ship them off to their customers, and then plug the new generation into their mining pools.
If we could trust ASIC manufacturers to not sit on the best hardware, you might be right. However, for the moment everyone can get their hands on CPUs and GPUs of roughly the same power, while easily accessible ASICs are several orders of magnitude slower than the current state of the art.