With things like Patreon tied to another content creation service, people make way more than people make on Steem.

Which people and how many out of every potential thousand do that? You're saying that people make more "writing" for YouTube through their Pateron link than people make on steem but avoiding the facts: how many people do that, how competitive is it. All these blogs and content media web sites that pay their writers but which combined haven't a chance to compete with the ammount of money steem has paid content creators or the number of content creators that got paid and keep getting paid.