Excellent first post ^_^
You sound like an impressive and intelligent person, and your analysis is good as basis for what most people could think as their first impression. Even though all of those people won't read my comment, I'd still like to give my perspective on what is happening here:

There is some echo-chamber type thing going on where the most popular subjects are most profitable to talk about, so because everyone is on steemit and excited about it, simply talking about steemit is a good way to appeal to everyone. There is another factor (you can see this one in my posts even), where there is currently a big surge of new people coming in, so lots of people are trying to put out tutorials for basic steemit things helping them along (I have made something about avatars because so many people don't seem to change theirs) Then you have a snowball effect where the initiatives to build up the info for new people are seen by the new people with $$ attached, so they start doing the same thing.

On note of cryptohype spam everywhere, I think it's a low-effort way to make posts relevant to a lot of people here, because this place was used by 99% crypto people for the longest time. All it will take for some major category shifting is a change in voting power that will happen over time, I will be rewarding things in game development, AI, machine learning, etc. while someone else may be rewarding infinite hype, after a while the rewards start moving to more interesting things, this is just a time where everyone is really excited about the recent growth ^_^

You make excellent points, I'll be following incase you decide to stick around.
I suggest looking at https://steemit.com/tags and go from there ^_^
STEEM ON!