Shorting stocks has a very high "you must be at least this right" bar in order to make money. And given the uncapped nature of losses - the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent - you need to also be really correct about how high it'll go before you're right, and also, you're borrowing these shares you've sold, so you're on the hook for the borrow fee and also on the hook for paying dividends paid out to those shares you're borrowing but not holding. Plus you have to pay for the margin loans you're using.

That's a very high set of both static and scaling costs that eat away any profit you made by being nominally correct. Combined with the risk profile... you can't "just" go short a stock.

And yes, you can hedge losses with options or construct complicated options positions to try to hone in on a specific price movement you're anticpating. Now you have to deal with entering and exiting a complicated multi-instrument position without price slippage, AND you have theta decay and volatility-related price movements also eating away at the core money you're making by being nominally right.

Have people made money? Yes, for sure. There's also a lot of dead bodies and people who barely broke even despite theoretically having been right.