Oh yeah, the system WILL fail eventually that way for sure.
Ok say you're a whale with 1 million SP. You can make money a few ways - you can blog everyday and upvote yourself. You can create content a few ways and people will probably engage with you and upvote you party because you're a whale. Or if you don't feel like creating content (or you don't know how to), then you can just rent out your SP (via delegation programs like minnowsupport), or bid bots where you make money upfront and cash it out.

You are right to say it's ruining the system - for example it messes up the Trending page, and discourages quality content creators.

The only one positive is that it is an incentive for big whales to not power down and leave, since they are making so much money backing these bid bots. Most of the bots are created by whale/orca accounts. If they power down and leave, they price of Steem would probably crash completely because the platform is not mature enough yet.