Monoliths vs. microservices has nothing to do with server-side rendering vs. GraphQL. Architecturally monolithic Web apps use GraphQL all the time.

I'm not sure why Medium does the weird blanking thing but my guess is that it's because it's deciding whether to let you read the article or instead put up a paywall. There are a lot of SPA sites out there, many of which aren't particularly economical with frontend resources, and they generally don't do that unless they're trying to enforce some kind of paywall or similar.