This is not entirely true.

You need to be really active. You are a heavy forum user. You spend hours and hours here each day. This is not common, this is not an easy thing to do. Most of the honorable people don't have time to do that.

To become a legendary you need to earn 1000 merits. To earn 1000 merits, unless we had art contests often, you need to make thousands of posts. I don't know a single user who has more than 1000 earned merits and less than 1000 posts.

Writing thousands good posts is a LOT. This demands time, effort, knowledge, patience... We make some money with all that effort here, which gives us some incentive. But that's a hard job to keep our activity here.

I don't think that ranking up is easy. It was very hard for me to earn my 1300 merits. Actually, it is still a great please for me to receive a single merit, even now. it is a recognition of all the effort I put in my contributions.