You seem to be saying that it's okay to put up a metered paywall as long as the articles are good. You are missing the point then. Substack is going to eat you alive. But I guess you got a good salary! Enjoy it while it lasts.

That's unnecessarily aggressive.

I don't feel like Substack is any less of a nuisance than Medium. Seeing either domain name immediately lowers my expectations; I go in expecting to get a mediocre article annoyingly interrupted with pop-ups begging me to create yet another online account, and sometimes I'll be pleasantly surprised with a good article annoyingly interrupted with pop-ups begging me to create yet another online account.

Not only do I dislike that enough to not want to use Medium or Substack as a reader, but it also means that I would never want to use Medium or Substack as a writer, either; yeah, I have all of three blog posts to my name, but even my shitty writing deserves better than to have any association whatsoever with such user-hostility.

You are not competing with paid websites, you are competing with free Wordpress blogs. Paywalling content is a mistake in your case.