I think that leveraging a platform like medium or dev.to can really help. I republish some content there and especially if you get picked up by one of the "magazines" it can put you in front of a different audience. This belief is based on a large part on research rather than firsthand experience, though.
Too bad the post received a somewhat bad criticism and my moral went down to keep writing at the time. I will get back to it someday for sure.
One of the things I've learned is literally don't "impose" anything to your readers. What I've written is mainly cited by big sources (and I have included the sources in the article!), but people rather prefer to point the finger if they do not agree with you.
I believe the article title is a bit "imposing" on the reader, but so do are all the other "click-baity" titles we see everywhere, and in this case I am able to prove my point of view, being it through an explanation or a PoC that I do provide as well. But people are mean :)
It sounds like "I wasn't a good writer, but I just wrote 50 articles and improved and now I had tens of thousands of readers a month"
I am skeptical that it was all about quality. If his first article had been the best article ever it's still unlikely he'd have found an audience/get noticed. So maybe it's about the frequency of posting? I think it'd be worth reflecting on this more, how did his readership grow in that early period? Were there any inflection points? Etc