I wrote one article on Medium. I ended up writing my own little version using open source markdown rendering to see how hard it would be to roll my own, https://jott.live

From what I found, there is a lot of stuff Medium does well that is hard to recreate by one's self. Super simple features, like

- rich text editing that isn't ugly

- caching what you're currently working on

- tracking views and who has viewed your article

aren't easy to build and generally aren't worth it unless you write many many articles.

Although I don't like the aggressive account on-boarding and payment models for reading articles, Medium certainly makes life easy for writing articles.