You went straight to the point! Engagement is not just about earning, when you take out the earnings there are other parts of engaging like learning, connecting and growth.
The engagement project has ended but that only took out the earning part of engagement, every other part still stands and it will definitely be rewarding overtime.
Well, it did only partly. You can still get votes but it's just not structured anymore as before. By now many here have build some stake so they can reward each other when they like a comment or post. And there's many other ways to earn on Hive. But yeah the engagement itself is still there, I even think it will be more natural now and not people just fishing for easy rewards with low effort generic comments.