I have a suspicion that most people’s issues with regular status actually have to do with reading quotas, not giving likes or posts.
Acorrding to the requirements it’s technically enough to give the equivalent of one like every three days. I don’t think this is enough in itself to encourage excessive or spurious likes. Again, posting in 10 different topics over 100 days is no daunting feat. A meme, a check-in, weigh in on two people’s stories, and a complaint about regular status, and you’ve already done a month and a half’s worth of the posting requirements.
Reading, on the other hand, is a much bigger investment. 12773 posts* across 500 threads. The link posted above also doesn’t mention the fact that for posts to count towards this, they have to have been created in the last 100 days. I’m not pulling this out of thin air, but inferring from the documentation for the software that this forum runs on. The reading requirements are very high and far outstrip any other effort required to maintain regular status.
*If the 12773 number was calculated based on a percentage of new posts in April '18, as I suspect, this number may be even higher now based on increased forum activity.