[q-big]

> No one wanted to invest in reading a 45 minute article

Honestly, I was/am quite the opposite kind of person: I mostly went to Medium for this kind of long reads. When the articles typically became shorter, I became much less interested in reading them - as you described:

> Turns out you can't say much in 10 minutes that wouldn't be a better Tweet. This lead to a race to the bottom in terms of article quality and length.

[dexwiz]

While I agree, long form content is almost exclusively better, it can be daunting. Medium was great as a quick scroll/dopamine hit, and long form goes against that. Also many long form articles are only made long via meandering threads, injected personal anecdotes, and literal filler. Strip that away, and it ends up closer to a Medium article. It takes great effort to write a long article that actually benefits from being long.