well put, I like to think of it as reputation (different from the reputation score) people read your posts and comments and that shapes how they think of you, how they perceive you. Some will like what you bring others won't and that's ok.
In the end the ones that keep engaging and have some fun and good discussions here will also be rewarded. It takes time and effort though, I guess even more so now that some projects have stopped. But there's still many opportunities and the engagement will continue and grow when the whole ecosystem sees more users!
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.