It's kind of a trap, but Medium definitely provides the audience. The articles I've written there have gotten way more reads and interactions in the last 2 years than anything I've ever written on any other blog I've had, and it required no SEO or paranoia over whether there's something about my markup that Google has decided it doesn't like.
The reason that I say it's a trap is because I think search engines, especially Google, don't seem to index things as easily as they did in the past. Any time I host a new site, it can take months for it to surface in search results, and even then it might not even show up in other people's queries which seemingly depends on the age on a site and whether Google's algorithm subjectively likes the content. But Medium has been around for a while and your articles appear in search results in mere days, sometimes less than a day. It's a trap because we're made to believe that we can't or shouldn't host our own material.
I would prefer that we wouldn't have to use Medium, but Medium has a product that delivers, and it's not the scam that people are making it out to be.
It really is a trap, and it also doesn't provide the audience that it used to. It's annoying to users who aren't bought into their ecosystem (it shows popups trying to get you to log in when you just want to read blogs), it doesn't support syndication in any reasonable way (they have some broken RSS stuff that also includes comments, which is obviously wrong for blogs where the content should be prioritized) and any number of other problems. It's not syndicating to the widest number of readers, instead its locking you into their diminishing readership.
You really don't have to use Medium. It's trivial to get things indexed by Google if that's what you're worried about (generate a sitemap and submit it with their webmaster tools, everything is indexed shortly, or just write good content that gets linked from other places and those links will be followed), and you'll thank yourself later when Medium decides to arbitrarily kick you off, or goes out of business, or who knows what else that could cause you to lose access to your content because you don't own the domain.
The reason that I say it's a trap is because I think search engines, especially Google, don't seem to index things as easily as they did in the past. Any time I host a new site, it can take months for it to surface in search results, and even then it might not even show up in other people's queries which seemingly depends on the age on a site and whether Google's algorithm subjectively likes the content. But Medium has been around for a while and your articles appear in search results in mere days, sometimes less than a day. It's a trap because we're made to believe that we can't or shouldn't host our own material.
I would prefer that we wouldn't have to use Medium, but Medium has a product that delivers, and it's not the scam that people are making it out to be.