1) I uBlock them on my phone and tablet. Unfortunately there are plenty of random sites on Medium with their own domain. I don't follow any of them and get there from HN or similar sites. Blocking all of them doesn't make sense because I'll probably never get back to that domain. I agree with the author, the button in the middle of the page really sucks.
2) On desktop, the button and the dickbar never show because I'm running with NoScript and they are a JavaScript thing :-)
The author misses another inconvenient feature of Medium, the login. It's either by oAuth (I don't remember which providers) or by email. That means they send me an email with a link to click to login. In theory it's ok, because obviously email is safer and more convenient than a password stored in a password manager (/sarcasm). The first time I used it the mail didn't arrive until the day after, so I've been primed against it. Probably almost everybody just login with Facebook or something so, quoting the author, "I’m not a part of his [Ev Williams] vision".