I am not a big fan of using this metric on it's own and should only be used as a consideration. I am simply providing the data in an easy to visualize format.
Great caveat here, I know a few people who have had the need to draw on what they have earned from Hive for living expenses and emergencies, but are still net contributors to Hive.
Hive is a complex organism and it takes some time to build up context for how various personalities have interacted with it.
For content creators my preference is to vote for people who positively feed back into the ecosystem, whether by the quality of their content, or the things they have built here.
The KE ratio is a great tool in the general case though.