Let's pretend you have a blog, you're writing on it for years. It's affecting people positively. But nobody ever says a thing about it directly to you, you have no analytics running in the background, no like button. Eventually, you're probably going to stop writing on the blog, feeling it's a waste of time.
We can point to popular bloggers all we want, but the fact remains most of them either have some form of view count operating (or likes/claps/whatever gimmick to replicate that "I see you" validation), had rare real life validation based on their blogs (being hired at xyz place because someone said they were a fan... but usually these blogs tend to go abandoned after they get hired), or relied on social networks to encourage them to continue writing their blogs.
Until this is solved in a healthier way, we're not really going to be free of view counts.