Great post - it definitely made me think !
For me, the picture is mixed and complex.
There are posts I do which are of an "admin" nature - HPUD posts and the like, which I wouldn't do if I wasn't on Hive but which have played an essential part in helping me become far more disciplined about growing my account within Hive. So for them, the earnings is nice but it's also about getting some discipline I can apply to other areas of growing assets.
Then there are what I think of as "life updates" - posts about cats and garden. If I wasn't on Hive, these would be the kind of thing which would be a quick photo on Facebook but with little explanation. So yes, without the earnings I probably wouldn't do these. But they've become a useful archive for the garden and ongoing bike restoration project, and I think my life is better for having written them.
Finally, there's the creative writing posts. I'd have done many of these anyway (and was doing them before Hive), but in a very different form - mostly as worldbuilding and background lore for my homebrew D&D world. There are some which I probably wouldn't have written down, which would have just stayed as stories buzzing around in my head, and I'm very glad of the opportunity to put these in a more tangible form. They're some of my worst earning posts, and I don't care because I'm writing them for me and if others find them enjoyable and entertaining enough to upvote, that's just an added bonus. I've got a vague pipe-dream of taking some of them, combining and expanding them, and turning them into a book. Who knows if that'll ever happen....