Well its like Chicken and Egg story.
The Steem exists because there are People (the more the acceptability of steem as currency the more value it derives), and People Exists because there is Steem (money - the crypto money)
Both need each other to survive. In case there is no money involved, Steem would be any other platform like Wordpress but not twitter or facebook
I see your point, of course, people don't need Steemit as much as Steemit needs them. Anyway, the egg was first, there were eggs way before the chicken, like dinosaur eggs :)