The design seems homogenized and "just ok", and the site is extremely heavyweight for the content it brings.
The social content is sparse, and instead I'm given links that resemble advertising.
First, the average quality of a Medium blog post continues to go down. A year ago I wouldn't have hesitated to follow a medium link, but now a combination of 1) low quality posts 2) low quality writers and 3) annoying popup means I stare at the link to try and see if I've read from this author before and if what they wrote is worth the hassle
Just my 2 cents, I'm sure others derive value from it, it's just that I don't
However, there can still be a benefit in certain audiences. Medium isn't that thing for me, but for example I sometimes repost my content on another website's blog section - this gets more niche views and most importantly feedback from a group of people relevant to the topic. I always make sure to check that this is actually allowed and mention that this content is reposted for the sake of transparency.
There are also some "side" effects on being on medium. You'll start with low reach, but the more your posts grow, the more you get visibility, and publications will start reaching out to let you be a contributor. For example, I'm now a writer for Hackernoon, even though I don't publish that much.
To give you a sense of the numbers, let's get my latest post: https://hackernoon.com/solo-the-first-open-source-fido2-secu...
I'm currently at around 1k views and 650 reads. Plus 1.3k of RSS feeds (all from hackernoon). I get usually 50-100 reads by posting on hn (without getting to the front page). This warms medium up, and hackernoon brings most of the rest. In 2-3 months these numbers will be at least double, thanks to SEO.
I'm not saying that you can't achieve these things with your own blog, but it's certainly harder and slower, unless you have already a decent followship on other socials.
But it also comes with negatives, biggest one being that most content is just old "re-purposed" content from other sources.
i recently switched from my free github pages jekyll blog to posthaven (https://websgrain.com/posthaven).
everytime i sat down to write, i wanted to fix or update something on my blog. it became too distracting. having an environment for just writing with limited customization is really focusing.