> That is not correct

That's an official publication of the company behind medium. Maybe they had some bugs in the past or the people who complained or the author just made mistakes.

Try to access this article: https://medium.com/@rochus.keller/implementing-call-by-refer...

Can you access it or not?

There are separate walls like account walls, max x articles per day, requiring sign in that are in addition and uncontrollable from paywalls, IIRC.

For metered content, "non-members get a select number of free stories in their member preview, which replenishes on the first of each month." (see https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017581433-About...).

If you hit the preview limit, you get the message "Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from."

Non-metered (i.e. free) content is not behind the metered paywall. Also if the author posts a "friend link" the article is freely accessible, even if metered otherwise.

Do you have other sources?

I'll keep an eye out for the exact message. I tend to avoid Medium as much as possible - scrolling is incredibly slow, and I recently found out medium storing several hundred MB of garbage in my localstorage, which it adds to every time I scroll.