Top authors, and I mean the literal top few on Hive dont actually earn much at all.
Top 10-20 on Hive earn something like 500 USD a month each.
And half of that is in HP.
The author side of the reward pool is basically just a Hive faucet to distribute the token to as many people as possible. Not as many tokens as possible, but rather to as many people as possible.
This idea of circle jerking nepotism is such a silly discussion left over from Steem.
Those guys making those claims are basically arguing about coffee money.