I don't think it's niche at all. Its a daily occurrence as someone who's constantly involved in steemitabuse; I've seen this "deserve" mentality constantly. I think you might be discounting people being attracted only to the $$$ and then leaving because they didn't get what they were "promised" by the system, if the reward changes.
It would happen if Steem price is high anyway.
This is actually not exactly true: the increase in steem price does not immediately affect the price of all posts. It has something akin to an averaging function of the price of steem over the past week or so. So if there was a spike to 10x the value of steem, we wouldn't see posts go to 10x right away. They would slowly increase over time to reflect the change. (Though, maybe we could do the same with value of SBD, and have witnesses report SBD/USD.)