Clearly voters have seen fit to allocate significant rewards to these efforts.

Nah, man. They are there to get the curation rewards because big whales will vote on them.

Also, it protects the relative stake level of those voting accounts because the "authors" won't be getting inflation, or so it seems.

as an investor, seeing that a good chunk of inflation is going to a burn is more of a positive to me that makes me more likely to want to invest

How many people actually care about burning? There are literally trillions of USD out there, but that doesn't stop everyone and their dogs cashing out into it.