At the time that post was written, STEEM had a market cap of over a billion dollars. Today it's just over $100M. Where many other tokens have grown 10x in value, STEEM has declined 10x.
Very few tokens have increased 10x since early 2018 and in fact very few have increased at all. Bear market and all.
Nevertheless STEEM has seriously underperformed even relative to that market and most of those other tokens, so your point is still fundamentally correct.
My data goes all the way back to the launch in 2016, but you’re right that the timing of that post is different, so I think I got that a bit confused in my head.