Lets say I am a random dude writing one off blog on medium.com. Will the user be still subjects to "5 free articles" per month? Will user be subjected to "Lets make things official" or is the quota only for firewall/paywalled articles?
If you don't opt-in to monetizing your posts, then they are not subject to the quota. I believe Medium will still show the pop-ups to get people to subscribe, but they won't ever actually be blocked from reading your posts.