The inflation rate for steem is the same for everyone, so the only way to profit on Steemit is either:

1. Watch steem as a coin rise and everyone's steem power/SBD is worth more (but you could just buy & hold and not join steemit for this).

2. Earn author and curation rewards - which is 20x harder to do now than a year ago due to growth in number of users. The amount of rewards distributed is fixed, so we have more minnows competing with each other for upvotes, and the value of each individual upvote is reduced (unless steem value rises - but you could buy & hold in #1 to take advantrage of that).

Authors like Jerry have huge followings and a ton of past content on other platforms (Youtube, Udemy, blogs, etc.) that he can recycle here. So someone like Jerry will be successful and can earn $200-500 per post. The rest of us have little chance to repeat that unless we build up a large following. It can be done, takes hard work, and you compete with the other 200k people trying to do the same.