I think you are right about the substance of there not being enough commerce being conducted with cryptocurrency, and that the lack of goods and services being exchanged for Steem/SBDs was one of the critical flaws in the ecosystem that undercut the "feeless transactions" aspect since the only thing you can really do with them is trade them for other currencies at which point you'll run into transaction fees again.

However, since the post is framed in terms of being all about Hive, I am not a huge fan of seeing it getting rewards on Steem.