If attackers only made ~$40 fora good amount of work, seems like it would have resolved itself if the scheme was left to run itself to conclusion before people

If attackers only made ~$40 fora good amount of work, seems like it would have resolved itself if the scheme was left to run itself to conclusion before people started blocking coinhive in (what sounds like from your description) a knee-jerk reaction. Then again, I'm sure there's quite a bit of tweaking that could be done to make clients submit far more hashes, but that would make it much more noticeable.