I'm not sure what Steemit uses to check duplicate content. I believe Copyscape has the means to add misspelled words and replace with the usual spelling to help detect trickery. Someone would have to be updating a data file whenever instances were spotted and reported.

Whenever you're publishing web content, and you want to rank for a word like "list", you would have it in your content. Misspelling it as "1ist" would be counterproductive as the google bot won't index you for "list". But that's in the real world I guess.