Yes, earning your first $1 here is easy, and if you make some influential friends, post every day (only once per day - don't get downvoted as a spammer!), and curate then you can make a nice side income.
Certainly enough to fund your espresso/Slurm habit, buy some video games, or in certain parts of the world do much more.
There are outliers here that do very, very well. I struggled to find someone who could be emulated, that is didn't start with a huge investment or run a witness. The best example I could come up with was 
Keep in mind the compounding effects of keeping reinvesting, plus USD value of Hive has been higher than it is now, so the potential earnings are actually greater than they appear. Of course, investments also go down as I unfortunately know all too well.
Hive as Rainy Day Savings
It's not necessarily about making a regular income, though some people do.
I have been saved a few times recently by having my wallet as an emergency savings account (kind of, there is a draw-down period, of course). Should I have kept the coins in place for when the value goes back up to when I bought in? Of course, but keeping paying the bills was more urgent.
What to Expect?
Earning enough to pay rent or a car payment is not the default.
As you might have gathered from my habitual doom and gloom moaning, even though I stupidly invested at the top of the valuation like a dork, I make more meaningful money elsewhere with other things. This is the reason I created a tool to repurpose the content I create here on my websites.
A big part of why I struggle on Hive is because I haven't been able to find ways to network very well that suit me.
I don't do well in realtime environments like Discord, nor do I attend the physical Hive meetups. Hard to get people to know and like you if they never meet you.
But I also need to point out it is because there are so many ways to fail here - you have just one post per day, and that post must get a bunch of valuable ($1+) votes, and within a deadline of 7 days. After 7 days you will earn nothing from that content directly (hence I repurpose it on websites that can earn indefinitely).
I have also put off a bunch of people because I keep arguing about politics because I still can't learn to take a breath versus reacting in the moment.
Friends Aren't an ATM
With the best will in the world the people who routinely vote on your stuff won't vote on everything you create, because they only have so many big votes per day to go around and there are more people to vote for than votes to go to them.
There are some reciprocal auto-voting arrangements, I am sure, but getting one of those deals likely depends on YOUR vote value also being high. Not something beginners need to think about.
Be grateful when you get votes, but make your focus be around creating content that people WANT.
About that Repurposing Idea
I mentioned that your content here has to succeed within 7 days, but that is not guaranteed. What about if you could make that content earn forever?
On my own sites I have posts that have been earning me money literally for years. I once around a decade ago reviewed the AWeber email marketing service and I still get cheques.
Yes, SEO has gotten a lot more difficult in the last 18 months as Google starts favouring Reddit and their own AI summaries etc, but it is still where the bulk of my income comes from.
My monthly returns are here in USD. Not nothing, and better than I made from Google Adsense, but if I relied on just the Hive earnings it would be less than minimum wage.
That same content on my own websites that I own and control could double this amount by referring one affiliate purchase or booking a 1 hour consulting client for me.
What I have created is a free WordPress plugin that pulls your content into your website, reformats it from Markdown, and copies the images. It does this automatically, so all you need to do is decide when and how you want to publish that content.
Remember, your content is YOURS. The community here doesn't own it. The community probably does deserve exclusive first access to it, though.
I would suggest you don't repurpose your content until after the 7 days is up, maybe more. Plus I would usually suggest adding and enhancing it too, make it unique.