You have been doing SEO for 6 years but sadly you didn't understand what Neil Patel was saying in his article.

The first point being is to NOT republish your content anywhere else yourself, that will always be the safest method. Because of low visibility though most of the time content creators get frustrated.

Reposting your content won’t help you generate much more traffic than you already have. I’ve tested this concept with authority sites that get over five million visitors a month. It’s very rare that they ever drive more than 1,000 visitors from a repost. If you are planning on using this tactic, do it from a branding perspective. Any extra traffic it drives back to you should be considered a bonus. And when using it, make sure you use a rel=canonical.

Clearly you are reposting to make rewards on SteemIT. ) 0.02% of traffic is nothing, just don't waste your time.

At KISSmetrics, we let others repost our blog posts. We push out the exact same content on sites like Entrepreneur.com and Search Engine Journal.

He is using method 2 for this :

Talk to the site owner – there is no harm in asking the site owner or editor to add a rel=canonical. We did this with Entrepreneur Magazine, and they gladly added it to their site even though it required development work on their end.

From a practical standpoint, I aim for option #2 first. If that doesn’t work, I go for option #3 next… I rarely consider option #1.

Option #3

Post the content on the other site only – sometimes it’s best to publish your highest quality posts on other people’s sites and not yours. You will get branding, a link back to your site, and maybe some sales. In most cases, the big sites want exclusivity, so you won’t be able to repurpose this content on your blog or other people’s blogs.

Option #1

Rewrite the content – you can rewrite your blog post and then publish it on these sites so that the content isn’t duplicate.

Rel=canonical or rel=no-index can be used for the post , but that is a hell of a lot of work load needed for the volume of articles Steem is producing daily.

Reposting is bad there's no doubt about that and no SEO in his right mind would allow it unless on specific occasions with control over the other websites code.

Anyx is just trying to help you out even though he is not obligated to, and personally, I wouldn't even consider adding you to the whitelist.

YOU are the bad actor in this specific case, creating the penalty for SteemIT.