I stopped posting here a few months ago. A big obstacle for me was the amount of time it took to create images (though it was often my favourite part of the process). Writing content was much quicker, by comparison.
Steemit was (and still is?) mainly for people who are interested in crypto. If you post anything which reinforces the idea that you're going to become rich through crypto, people are going to read and upvote your content. I don't care about crypto, though I do care that people are going to lose money by gambling on it.
I used to come up with some pretty entertaining content and I had a couple of regular readers who were very supportive. But no one was really reading what I had to say. It was just the wrong community for the things that I was saying.