While I do agree that middleman suck I don't see the posh rewards that way and at the same time I also run a big curation project so while not all posts that get POSH'd get curated it doesn't have to be connected.
Think of it this way, most authors -as long as they aren't receiving unfair upvotes due to some backroom deals or whatever reason who don't want to be seen- do want the attention and more views. So you're leveraging your following on web2 to bring them more views, possibly new followers or even followers already on Hive who stumbled upon their post and account thanks to your tweet cause they're following you there but just didn't happen to catch your reblog, etc. Of course if the rewards get out of hand where those sharing are earning more than the post itself it's nice to give some back but you shouldn't feel the need to and at the same time I think curation is now at a pretty good place where most content and authors who've been around a while are getting curated somewhat decently. We have a big team of curators looking to make sure that happens and while we can't cover all of Hive (although we try) we're in a much better position today than where we were on the old chain.
Either way, POSH'ing is only a net positive for the platform as long as it's done well and not cheated. You bring it traffic, you grow our twitter presence for when its needed and consistently get more traffic towards our tags on there, potential new users and a lot of other various things. It benefits not just the authors you're sharing through views but by growing the value of their stake and everyone else's since a social media needs traffic and users, it's the #1 priority in my opinion. We still have ways to go, onboarding needs to be reworked in some ways or fine-tuned but overall I think things are flowing pretty well in general along with the technical side of scalability to be ready for when something clicks and Hive goes viral to be able to both welcome everyone with accounts but also maximize retention through distribution of stake being wide so everyone can chime in to assist the newcomers.
That's a super reasonable way to look at it. (See, I figured you folks had thought this through lol!)
And I totally agree, more eyes on HIVE is a bonus, provided we can bust out of the bubble of existing HIVE users. (Which is part of why I almost exclusively share D&D/TTRPG/Worldbuilding stuff)