In Safari you can ask it to load certain websites with reader view automatically. If you do so, Safari will change to reader view as soon as it can render the page.
This how I deal with the annoying stuff in Medium.
I don't follow regularly anything except the HN homepage. However there are many blogs with their own domain that are actually Medium and they get linked to HN every now and then. I wonder if that extension is smart enough to process them too. I use uBlock to hide the Open in App button and the sticky bar, in case the same site will get linked again.
Static Wordpress. Seriously. WP has the biggest selection of themes, and being static practically removes all common security-related hurdles. Other static generators would come second first. Then Ghost, which aims to be the blogging platform that WP used to be.
I second Ghost for that use case, I'm using it for years already for my personal blog (not very active: https://blog.notmyhostna.me) and it's getting better all the time without getting bloated so far. I never really got started with static site generators as it's just too much overhead for me.
If you don't want to self host it and be even closer to the hands off approach of Medium you can just buy the hosted version.
Blogger is still around. So is Wordpress. So is Github pages. Blog hosting is a dime a dozen. If you want a Medium-like layout, you can probably get 95% of it with a couple dozen lines of CSS.
> In Safari you can ask it to load certain websites with reader view automatically.
That is nice. Firefox has an extension called "Open in Reader View" that adds an item to the context menu for links. But one still has to use it explicitly. (AFAIK, at least.)
I deal with it by avoiding medium. Seriously, why support them in any way with page views/whatever if you disagree with their presentation method?