where does the money come from, especially in the current market environment.

A legitimate issue for sure. But, steem would not be in the position it's now in if so much value hadn't have been allowed to leave this platform without contributing through the creation of decent content.

I think that many underestimate the power of a virtuous cycle! Without bought votes, and with a trending with even half the content good content, that virtuous cycle could have happened. All the boom that happened in 2017 was off the back of BTC bull market. If steem had have stuck to it's value proposition, I think millions would have flocked to steem off the back of seeing decent content genuinely rewarded. I'm a professional writer and I saw a mini version of that virtuous cycle when I first started here as curie upvoted a lot of my content. This incentivised me hugely to keep creative high quality content while staking my SP. I actually even bought steem with my SBD and staked that, to this day I've out more steem in than I've ever removed. So you can imagine how pissed I am to see steem's degeneration.

Incentivise peoples passions and tallents and you're on to a winner. With millions of mainstream people coming to steem we would have seen huge price increase through speculation. I'm not sure what the results would have been long term, but it wouldn't have looked like it does now!