I don't know or understand as well as you do. However, I can offer my opinion as well as tell you what I do know from my personal experience. The pandemic has greatly affected millions of peoples lives in the past two years, you can't deny that. So why wouldn't that be a hot topic? A topic that alot of people want to learn about because they can relate to it in some way.
As far as inviting others to Hive, I have been trying to get my family on Hive for 2 months. Signing up and use HIVE is a PAIN and is NOT very USER-FRIENDLY. To give an example, did you know ecency only allows one signup per IP? It took me a month to figure that out. I use Hivesigner, and it only works 50% of the time. Usually when I use it to login, I get redirected to a page that says oops(503 I think).
I don't link to Hive because I don't use any other social media. I did have a blog on Blogger, but stopped using it due fear of getting banned by Google for voicing MY OPINION, which means my gmail getting banned and losing thousands of dollars worth purchased content on the play store and getting locked out of my Android phone. Before you say "that will never happen", just look at the people who have been banned because of voicing their opinion on YouTube.
I think it is because of people like you that destroy good communities.