Not addressing what is specifically on the trending page (not something I often look at to be honest), but in a free market, value is not determined by effort but by demand. It's about how much someone likes your product (post), not how much work you put into it. In theory putting more work into a post makes a higher quality, more "in demand" product (on average) but that is far from always the case. Of course this gets skewed somewhat by autovoting and the fact that votes are almost free.

However, suggesting that everyone put a cap on their rewards isn't going to work. Most people just won't do that. Not unless a way can be found to incentivize that in a positive way. Besides, you might put a ton of work into creating high quality posts that get little reward and then one day make a lower effort post (I don't mean spam or complete shitpost...just a shorter lower effort post) that makes a lot...hardly seems fair to limit yourself at that point does it?

Downvotes are the mechanism that are supposed to be used to adjust rewards when they are too high. The problem is that in their current iteration they don't function well enough to do that. A downvote often leads to revenge downvotes because it is taken personally. Alternatively, some whale may make a relatively small downvote in an effort to adjust rewards but if hundreds or thousands are following that downvote then that is impossible. Your post will go to 0 if downvoted instead of being moderately adjusted. We need a better way to adjust rewards as a community when they are seen as too high but I don't have an answer as to how at the moment.