I'm not keen on playing the browser plugin escalation game with fundamentally UX hostile sites like Medium. They clearly have no respect for the human being at the end of the line trying to simply read a document.

This is extremely melodramatic. They literally just want money so they don't have to run ads

For this article, anyway, they don't want money. At least, the form claims that signing up is free -- so they just want an account created.

(Which I'm not OK doing, because that tells me that they want to track me, presumably for advertising purposes.)

It's worse than that. They took at least $163m in venture money: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium/company_finan...

They've been flailing around for a decade in search of a model that works. If UX hostility is what it takes to have a story that retroactively justifies the investment, UX hostility is what we'll get.

i want money toooooo.

There is also LibRedirect[1] which automatically redirects to an alternative frontend.

[1] https://github.com/libredirect/LibRedirect