Are you seriously arguing that slavery wasn’t profitable for plantation owners?

Aside from being dangerously close to “well actually we were doing the slaves a favor!”, that argument is absolutely absurd.

Do you really think that they couldn’t get more economic value out of enslaved labor than they put in in shitty food and housing? By that logic, the poor poor plantation owners could just barely scrape by on a subsistence income. Does that match up with the lavish estates that we see in the south to this day?

Aside from being illogical it’s also ahistorical - milenia ago the Romans had massive slave-based plantations generating obscene wealth.