Reader View on Firefox (CTRL + ALT + R) is a blessing!

Nah, fuck them. If they're gonna be that hostile to users users should just leave.

"After closing the huge sign-up popup, dismissing the Medium-App-suggestion and closing the cookie-banner I lost all interest in reading the article, which is a shame."

If everyone on HN spoke up about this maybe this issue would get fixed. Ban any site that bombards us with pop-ups or begs us to disable private mode from HN and this place would be a lot better off.

Remember when the original pitch of Medium was “the best reading experience on the web”. Crazy how far they let their user experience slip.

Related to an HN article from earlier this week: you might consider trying the Brave browser. With it, I didn't experience any of that.

I was trying to read it on an iPhone using Safari. The mobile "experience" is way, way worse compared to that on a big screen. At least two thirds of my screen estate were blocked by popups and that's how the vast majority of (mobile) users are going to experience it as well.

it auto-closes sign-up popups and cookie prompts ?

I just checked again (on mobile). It does show the sign-in prompt (was just less obtrusive on desktop). It doesn't show app prompts or cookie prompts.