The underlying issue is that Medium enshittified basically overnight, as soon as it had inertia. Went from 'text is cheap, put your stuff here!' to 'how dare anyone expect our servers to work for free, here's a gigantic fat image instead of the kilobyte of content.'
Good thing I've been avoiding medium since its inception. At the start, it was edgy "influencer" types who didn't want to pay for hosting, and now it's edgy "influencer" types who obsess over copyright.