I agree with many of your points, but my overall reaction is: YMMV.

Everyone writes on this platform for their own reasons. For me, the articles I publish in publications get hundreds of more readers than the ones I write solo. I never had anywhere close to this level of readership on the 3 different blogs I've had over the years. Can you "make more money" with your writing elsewhere? I'm sure you can. But that means spending hours marketing your blog and figuring out how to monetize it. That's uncompensated time. Since I work full-time in another field and have all the responsibilities of daily living solely on my shoulders, I don't have that kind of time to devote to marketing my writing in the hopes someone might see it somewhere.

I am not trying to make my living writing. I'm trying to improve my writing by crafting stories appropriate to different publications, writing better headlines, and getting feedback from readers. Being on this platform motivates me; publishing an article to a personal blog that no one reads is totally demotivating.

I strongly disagree with many of the "features" that Medium's CFO is pushing that I don't think are writer friendly. I don't like their disingenuousness about them. But for me, the pros of continuing to write here outweigh the cons.

If my goals change, that calculus will change.

P.S. $5 a month is hardly an onerous amount to pay; I read at least a half dozen stories a month I find worth that price, written by writers I follow. I pretty much ignore the rest, just as I learned to tune out TV commercials and ads in Google search.