Whatever you do, just don't use Medium. Ghost or Hugo (With Netlify, https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/) are both very low effort solutions and most of them come with themes that don't look too bad from the get go. It's very quick to get something up and running even though it's technically a static site generator.
There’s a lot of non nerd solutions. Ghost, Wordpress, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr are all very easy to Süd- platforms. There’s a variety of free and paid platforms. The existing solutions are not the problems.
I do have a Hugo blog, and I agree that pretty much all static-site generators are too nerdy for most potential users.
WordPress is still around, and I recommend it. It's more "social" than ever in some ways, and the built-in comments are looking better and better as the years go by. (I use Disqus to moderate the comments for more than a dozen blogs in one network, but for an individual blog, I prefer the native WP comments.)
