"If you wish to simply “burn” a percentage of your rewards, thereby lowering the total amount of STEEM in existence, you can simply set @null as a beneficiary. @null is a special account on Steem that no one owns or controls. Any funds sent to @null are removed from the token supply."

If Steemit did that with their massive stake, instead of selling it onto the market, STEEM prices would finally recover. "Onboarding the masses" would actually be possible once we had a stable currency again. Instead, sounds like they are encouraging everyone else to do so, but they could (and should) be the ones burning up their stake to save the platform.