I want to say that it's like that astronaut meme, "always has been".
That is, they were always trying to mess with your head and get you to think Medium was a little bit better than the rest of the web but it always was just a little bit worse and it's gone downhill since then.
If you want to blog you have to put work into: (1) setting up a blogging platform, (2) writing, and (3) promoting your blog. All of those are a lot of work. Medium handles (1) and (3) for you, but the problem is that a person who is too lazy to do (1) and (3) is likely to be too lazy to do a good job of (2).
(One of my early Medium experiences was meeting a guy who was gushing that he got 70 views on his Medium blog, he was about excited as I would get when I was actively blogging and got 70,000 views on an article.)
So under the guise of making things a little better, Medium really lowered the bar and reduced people's expectations for blogging but somehow the Jedi mind trick still stuck and people are still coming to a moment of cognitive dissonance.
The individual who wants to execute on long form essay publications should just start a blog. They'll need to "execute" on (1) and (3) but there is the saying "if you want to get something done ask a busy person". Someone who takes (2) seriously is going to have the passion to get both (1) and (3) right which are both very personal and need to be tailored to what you want to communicate.
If you want to be the next Medium, the first thing to look at is Substack which is quite interesting. Substack very much stole Medium's visual design which is confusing enough to begin with but it's particularly confusing for the audience of Medium because the people who think (1) and (3) aren't worth doing fundamentally mistake surface for substance. As much as Substack is always harassing you to subscribe to an email newsletter, you could miss out entirely on this being a key part of the value proposition because we are so accustomed to ignoring things that are being yelled at us online.
Substack doesn't promise discoverability in the same way Medium does, to the contrary people are drawn to Substack by serious (if sometimes seriously bent) writers such as Bari Weiss, Tony Ortega, and Robert Reich. On one level Substack delivers on what Medium promises, and the success of things like Patreon shows that a lot of people would rather pay $5 a month to support a serious author than pay $5 for a huge collection of low effort blogs that should be paying you to read them. On the other hand it is not so clear that Substack has a sustainable business because anybody who's making real money on Substack can pay somebody to set up an email newsletter script and a payment gateway. Particularly with their reliance on hot-headed political content they are at high risk that Substack gets caught in the crossfire and when anybody who gets kicked out or who gets pissed at Substack can go elsewhere their risk is high.
If you are going down that road you do have to think: who is the customer? Do you (a) want to make blogging easier or do you (b) want to be a destination? The fashion today is that a business that does (a) and (b) could be a "two-sided market" with a moat, but there's a terrible tension between the two in that a destination really has to be better than the rest of the web and not worse. Other that you wind up with Medium which sucks and always has.