The text comes directly from the proposal for the HBD stabilizer. This is in place for quite some time as you can see in the screenshot:
I believe that @archange said that he sees the author rewards as a kind of marketing fee to attract people and to keep them in the community. I believe he is quite right with that. This comment upvoting is certainly good for the HBD stabilizer or even the price of hive but I think it would be better if we could attract people with higher rewards. I don't think that somebody is willing to learn how Hive works if he can then expect to get 0.05$ post rewards...
Its a faucet, not much more than that imo.
Im more talking here about the content creator ecosystem and it not being able to be built on the base layer. On L2 maybe. On base definitely not. If that is indeed what we want to have. Ofc it depends on the type of content you want to happen, but that again requires L2 since reward distribution on base layer is heavily influenced by archaic ideas of what should and should not be rewarded.