I am currently advising a project, starting from Italy, that aims to create a Web3 Patreon, so I quite feel what you say and I totally agree! Inflation on Hive is a so easy way to support authors without the necessity to take something out from our own pockets.

I am also blogging (for professional exposure) on Medium, and I am going to speak about Hive there as well, trying to bring traffic from Medium to here. Medium has a bigger exposure than Hive but Hive is a more real community, made of "more real" people. That is why I am using them both: here to enjoy the community, have interactions with people and seeing a lot of different contents based on my specific interests. Medium has become quite much advertising and to grab attention too many titles are the copy-paste of some attention-trigger guides for article titles.

I have once received a tip of 1Hive here, for a technical article about Cannabis I wrote. I felt so grateful because I knew that this action was not a simple "Upvote --> 100%", that was still good: one person, decided to send 1Hive to my account as a way to thank me for the quality of the article.
I too feel quite strange when I post much informative and divulgative articles and I can barely reach the 1$ threshold.
So yes, I think that sometimes sending Hives or delegating some HP can be a great (and not free) way to support other authors, like millions of people are doing on Patreon and other pay-per-view platforms.