You brought up a few good points and I think it's pointing to the source of the issue with steemit. I feel, just as many others here, that steemit (the flagship product of steem blockchain) is no longer evolving. No one is actively working on it to make it better. There is no ad integration, no outside source of revenue, no attempt to capture a wider audience and investor. It exists only because people buy steem so they can collect dividend/payout by lending their steem power to voting bots.
You're right in saying there's hardly any consumers on this site, barely anyone reads, most of them are producers of content. Since there is hardly any content consumer, advertisers won't come to steemit to. It slowly becomes a pyramid scheme as only the people who invest into steemit want to drain its money. It will topple as soon as people stop buying steem because upvote bots don't bring enough returns. I hope it doesn't die then, I think it still has potential, just badly managed.
Just imagine if they can get backing as a blogging website similar to wordpress, maybe even integration with basic attention token so the ecosystem is more complete.
Yes, I am also working on a publication on a possible alternative that the community can have when integrating advertisements, not too many, we do not want this to be YouTube, but it is clear that a change is needed. My opinion is that current content creators should write things that can be of usefulness or interest to other people, that is, when a person searches in google and suddenly find several articles of Steemit and then decide to create an account, not to become content creators, but to participate in the discussions and interact in the comments.