Gathering an audience is way harder without Medium. It might be atrocious in other ways, but it vastly increases the chances of your content getting read.
Does it really tho? This one seemingly got featured by someone at Medium and it pulled in around 10 000 hits from newsletters. While it's more than nothing its no where near the majority source of my traffic.
On principle I'll avoid viewing an article if it's being hosted on medium and skim the comments to decide whether it's worth viewing directly. Probably go on to view the original about 1% of the time. Sorry author, but using medium already counts against you.
And what's with all these sites that now force you to accept their cookie policy? Totally pointless when you configure the browser to delete cookies when the browser exits...