I think Medium showed the world that you can't build a subscription business by commoditizing the content. I've read a lot of great content on Medium, but I don't remember who it was by, and that's why I never considered subscribing to Medium. Their content lacks the personality that platforms like Substack, and even traditional online newspapers like NYTimes, possess.
To me, Substack just looks like a clone of Medium. What makes it different?
When I load a Substack article, I see the article, with only the distraction of the "JavaScript required" banner at the top, and the page works without JavaScript.
When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.
Try Scribe, a private front end for medium and GitHub Gists.
That proxy is great, thanks for sharing! Most annoying thing about Medium pages is the multi-second waiting period while the page is loading. (On Chrome on a M1 Pro, mind.)
Its not available on the chrome store because of manifest V2, there is privacy redirect but its abandoned and doesn't support scribe.