on that, it kinda depends on the community. if there is a community for your texts people will read it (probably not in 100k but i think we are a bit misled by numbers of supper popular creators. few 1000 is a big number).
abut the search engines, you need to write stuff that will show on search engines. i am for sure not the best blogger, but i do have few blogs high in the search results and they get few views every day.
abandoning rewards is mentioned every few years. and it will not happen in the next X years and maybe never.
Author rewards r too low even for top 1 author of the month. My concerns are different. Maybe we will talk about that another day. Time to sleep