I'm not sure what you mean by clickbait. The thing I think you are paying Medium for is discovery from the user side. The writers are attracted there for the audience side. So let's say I'm an author and I put I paywall in front of my articles. How do I get 100K people to even read my free article and come to my site? I agree that if that problem were easy, I'd not need Medium. I also think that by paying for the bundle, I'm more likely to consume up to that amount meaning more writers get paid which encourages more articles and more writers to try also.
Isn't this just clickbait all over again? If you were actually willing to pay for good writing, a simple email address or paypal link would be enough. But you aren't, so it's not, and online writers have to do all sorts of strange things to pay the bills.