> Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper.

False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page.

I think in 1910 it would have been like counting people passing by the newspaper stand as "hits".