Well, to an extent, it is not, there is a high class of whales who basically can pump any article they decide, and, since they can upvote themselves, even if they just post 3 sentences and a photo of food, they get 50 USD per post

Oh that was absolutely the case for the most part of steem existence. But is changing lately :) The first step is the hardest one, you need to build some followers base. With the recent implementation of communities this is a bit easier to do. Check out steemleo, gems or ocd communities for example. Best of luck!

PS. I see that you used steempeak community to redirect to this post. That's a good start! You can also use "repost" functionality to do this.