How does anyone use Steem as an income source?

First of all, HELLO :D Haven't posted in the last 7 months, but I'm pretty active in the Homesteaders Co-op Discord server if you'd ever like to chat plants and permaculture ;)

In the mean time we (me and @bghandmade) opened up a shop in the platform and even had 2 sales! Selling seeds and handmade paper for crypto! Who would have thought!

So the main reason I'm writing this short post is to ask a few questions. I hope there are people still following that'll try to answer and probably get a discussion.

In the recent months I've seen plenty of "fundraising" posts on Steemit, countless contests, more and more curation initiatives and generally stuff that creates the impression that people are using Steemit not just for the blogging and social parts, but for the paying part as well, which is inherent in the platform, after all.

But I'm really struggling to understand how could anyone (excluding whales and the largest owners of steem) make an income from Steem?

The mechanism seems to be: post something - get payout - power up - post some more. If you start selling steem, you're basically losing your steem power, so selling to make an income undermines your presence on the platform. It's as if the idea most people agree upon is to just hold all your steem and power it up and that's it.

Could someone explain how can anyone use Steem as an income source then?

I can imagine if one has tens of thousands of SP and then sells just the extra steem generated by his activity on the platform. But with the current price of steem, 30 cents or something like that, even in a low income country as our own, we're talking selling at least 200-300 steem a week to amount to something noticeable. I can imagine that by USA standards, that's multiplied by 10.

I recently read a post by my old time favorites, @mountainjewel - Wren and Ini. Even that great and popular post has just about 10 STU projected payout. So you'll need a Reputation 68 user to make dozens of high quality posts a week to make a very modest income in a relatively poor country.

So what am I missing?

Are people using Steemit as a sort of an investment, turning their content into "bonds" that could cost a lot more at some point, just sitting tight and waiting for an event that might never happen? What would happen if steem reaches a high price and people decide to "cash out" and sell, won't that trigger another price drop?

I cannot understand how can a fundraiser actually raise funds as a large 1000 token pot would amount to just 300 USD. How can a 20 token contest reward be lucrative, if you need the income now?

Or probably people are just using Steemit as a regular blogging platform, disregarding the potential income part, as it's certainly not viable at the moment?

Drop a line in the comments and let me know what you think!