There's more to Medium than exists on the surface. It's an entire social network of people recommending and tagging articles, newsletters, all sorts - I've gotten good long term traffic before now from posting on Medium, traffic that lasts a lot longer than a short term (but much higher) burst from a Reddit or HN post.

The problem for Medium is that it just wasn't successful enough. If a lot more people were using it, it would make sense as a social platform. But it's mostly just a blog platform people link to.

(also, being able to host a blog is an important skill, but I'd never dismiss a programmer who wrote a fascinating article just because they didn't also self-host it. I could just as easily make the case that writing clearly is an important skill, and any programmer who wrote an incoherent blog post is not worth their salt. But I won't.)