As I said in another post that tackled the same problem I think this will go away with time (hopefully) but only if (as you mentioned) people stop rewarding them with attention, upvotes, and comments. it's fairly similar to Buzzfeed or any other website that produces "content" if you can call it that just for the sake of it. If people suck it up it will stay here.
Also, how does one flag comments like that? Does it do any good, are there steem admins that one can report those abusers to? I am new to this site so I didn't even know that one can flag people. Anyhow, point is stop rewarding spammy comments and content and the site will resort to a more natural and balanced state again, it's a team effort but worth trying.
I agree @thauerbyi that it should revert to a balanced state, as long as nobody encourages the behavior. You'll note to the far right of your name in the comment is a little flag. That is for downvoting content. Enough downvotes will make a comment or a post start to disappear. Be careful what you do with downvotes, people can and will come after you.