I like your skepticism. The interface definitely leaves more to be desired but is at least clean simple and works. The fact it got hacked is bad and enforcing a 2FA at bare minimum needs to happen. But almost every business/website is getting hacked today because security is always a lagging priority. If you clone steemit but don't make any changes, why would anyone use that? And that's the point. Anyone can make software that interfaces with the steem blockchain and there is open source software you can use to help you develop it. And yes, most people will make more money with a real job but some people will have wild success on here and won't need to do that. But that's a small subset of the users. It's not really any different on youtube, twitch etc. Only a small percentage of users actually can make it worth it money wise.