Internet 101 - When developers started giving away things for free, user data became the new medium of exchange for services rendered. And anyone who didn't have an explicit interest in exploiting said data for monetary gain, IE - ad revenue, became a guinea pig for the social engineering experiment that is the Information Age.

I've been on many a web forum over the years and there is one consistent throughout - the devs never do anything that isn't beneficial to the company's bottom line. That's why Medium is in the state it's in. We're not customers, we're lab rats feeding the machine to maximize profit. Any way which can be found to maximize their profits by giving us the least usability possible, they'll do it, and no protest on our part will matter.