If on the other hand, you want to make money off your writing, like Matt Taibbi, then Substack is the place for you. They give you most of the royalties. Ted Gioia explains it in his interview with Rick Beato.
On the lightning itself: Some of the consulting offers I got in response to the post on dev hiring strategies were... interesting. I didn't pursue any of them, but they showed the world is a weirder place than our whitewashed walled gardens make it out to be.
I'd certainly agree that the most "professional" (polished? well-written? organized?) writing I read these days is on Substack. In five more years, that writing will inevitably be found on a new platform that displaced Substack which bumped Medium, which ate Blogger, etc. Any bets that Evan William's next business will also involve publishing people shaking their fist at clouds?
I don't know, but these are not independent trials. Maybe some of the people who saw your first post will come back for more. Good luck to you.
As for "in five more years": eventually, some of these polished, well-written pieces will be appearing under a single cover, all at one convenient price. We could call it a "magazine" (tm).
Yeah, no. I have a friend who tried to make money off his writing, and every reader he got mistook themselves for his boss. He'd stopped publishing because it just wasn't worth the hassle to him anymore.