It's starting to get to Juicero levels of absurdity.
I made a small CMS at work that started to gain steam. 2 years of me using it and no issues, but then I turned it over to the marketing team and they crashed the VM it ran on in 2 days. I have no idea how, it’s just a bunch of text boxes and a SQL DB.
That’s what medium is trying to build. A text box that marketing people can’t fuck up. It’s just sad that technical skills are so low in society that it takes $130mil to do that.
You have little idea what you are talking about for somebody so dismissive.
If you need another example, look at https://dev.to/ for a fantastic blog UX, and it's open-source so Medium can just copy it for free and end up with a better product.
While WordPress still dominates large areas of the web, they have a decentralized model vs medium. It's like comparing scaling web forums to reddit ("why do they have so many outages? All they do is store text!"), but reddit obviously has a way higher load than any single forum. I'd wager the same is true for medium.
To continue on with the metaphor, medium, like reddit, is solving a different problem than the wordpress/squarespace model: you don't have to roll your own. You get a built in audience due to centralization and the cache of the site (For some reason I associate a medium link as being more legit than seeing a WordPress hosting site. Strange, but better branding I guess.)
Scale is differently, but again there are plenty of sites with far more complex usage and data that took much less to create and run. Stackoverflow being that example.