Objectively, checking the amount of sMerit that is being awarded on a weekly basis on the Merit Dashboard (Global Summary tab or Sent Merit Tab), the amount is rather stable overall, being in the 3,9k-4,5k per week since the beginning of May 2018.

Of course if we scale this up to a monthly  follow-up, the amount of awarded sMerit has in effect decreased over the months noticeably:
July 2018:         17.768
May 2018:         19.807
April 2018:        23.482
March 2018:      32.141
February 2018:  48.374
January 2018:   39.170

Recently we discussed this issue in a couple of threads on Meta ( Incentive to the Merit Sources to Achieve their Quota? and Analysis- sMerits per transaction and sMerit transactions per post-Are they low? ).
The basic additional output is that awarding is very often on very low amounts (namely one or two sMerits), and posts tend to be awarded by one person or two at most. These patterns may vary a bit depending on the forum board we focus on.

What does seem weird is that the amount of sMerit awarded per month these past few months is roughly the amount that Merit Sources have at their disposal per 30 days (last I saw, there are 81 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 18.700 sMerit per 30 days).
We do not know how much of the aggregate sMerit Pool the Merit Sources manage to award, but in the extreme cases of awarding it all (which does not happen really), it would mean that basically only Merit Sources have sMerit available or are commited to awarding on the whole. As I said, that is logically not the case, but I would have expected a weekly overall sMerit of at least twice what the Merit Sources have.

Statistics may seem a bit of a bore to some, but the give us some solid insights which normally surpass our intuition and, on occasions, ament it (as I often find myself).