Ghost [1] and Substack[2] seem to be popular alternatives within dev and tech communities.
I guess anything with a low barrier to entry, has to do more to prove itself.
The web has become broadly influenced and geared towards a certain way of doing things that happens because:
1. it costs money to create and maintain a substantial web property. Medium, Substack, Patreon, gumroad, ghost, buttondown, etc all run on top of services that cost money. Maybe AWS, maybe Google App Engine, plus Cloudflare, Heroku, Netlify, Digital Ocean, etc. Oh and Stripe, PayPal or some payment processor, if the site has a subscription model, too.
2. the web of the 2020s really has only one way to make enough money to pay for these services: advertising. There's only one way to get enough money through advertising to be profitable, and that's to have some portion of attention-getting, clickbaity, top 10 list content. That content generates enough 'virality' to show up on Twitter, FB, here, or wherever.
A no-paywalled, no-ads site (like Hacker News) is a cost center maintained as a sort of vanity project for a company that makes money elsewhere.
What people are complaining about around Medium is really a complaint about how content on the web is, and must be, monetized, if it is to be a money-making business, as opposed to my blog, say, which is just money out of my pocket.
It's going to take a concerted effort to break away from the current economic model of the web. Just turning up our noses at Medium or Substack and pivoting to the NEW new thing won't change anything, as the new new thing inevitably gets dragged into the web economy or goes broke.