I actually think we need curation a great deal nowadays - there is definitely a market for it, if nothing else. The massive amount of chaff 'content' is hard to wade through. Your second paragraph is dead on, though.
Curation is a solved problem: # of retweets/likes/upvotes.
That's popularity tracking, not curation.
It is curation of the most popular things, which in turn are the ones that matter to most people.
Maybe in the sense of articles it can be of benefit, but with video or images it can be bereft of context which can stray, intentionally or not, towards misinformation.