Strong disagree on Medium, Substack, etc. There are very famous and popular blogs on both with tons of followers. My sister asked for a blog, I steered her to substack. Zero effort, just works.

> Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.

Nothing about substack wastes readers time.

Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for non-nerds)

A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing. Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your blog.