At least in 2017 there was the incentive to create good content. Sure not all good content was being discovered but at least some was. Now there is no incentive. So yes in 2017 at least some content discovery and incentive existed even if flawed.
Now it's just bots and basically pay for popularity. This is also called pay to win.
And yes the current rules differ from 2017, but anything is better than to do nothing with the current proven broken economics.
Much of the problems I feel could be addressed by a better "pay for popularity" system that is part of the actual platform. The promoted tab failed in this and bidbots took its place. If we were to give some real thought into building an advertising economy into the platform, we could pull in top bloggers and vloggers and provide facilities to pay for popularity without diverting the whole reward pool through the bidbot economy.