It's good that you've figured this out, it's very interesting. I also noticed that the figure for the rewards paid is extremely high, but due to lack of time, I didn't go into the calculations to check it.

we get about $4,000 per day going to creators

I wanted to know this number for a long time 😁. Even with the current bad market conditions, Steemit still rewards content creators significantly. The task of the curators is to distribute these rewards wisely.