Clearly people found value in it.

That's not the conclusion you want to make, there's plenty of stuff that gets random upvotes some times and sets off a chain reaction of getting to trending without anyone really have read it. I mean come on look at traf's and haejin's+rancho's votes the past year, they had a literally post using that exhaust dapp saying how much they ran that day in one sentence sit at $130 on trending.

Just cause some people manage to get on those autovotes and trails (similar to lucy I imagine), then farm them out posting some garbage daily and someone comes in disagreeing with some of those rewards or someone does that + gets personal cause of something OP may have said that doesn't mean that Hive is flawed just cause that author can't get his free rewards from auto votes without much thought.

Do you ever wonder how most of the authors that cry about "reward censorship" never received any rewards in the form of tips/subscriptions? There's recurring payments now but it is quite literally not used at all. You'd think if some whales that vote them up would be that interested to read their content they'd pay them to create it if the post rewards get downvoted, let alone maybe drop them a comment now and then.