I don't think Medium is going anywhere. Just because they backed off their previous monetization strategy they can easily go raise more money with their traction, and find a better model.

Anyhow, Medium has a much stronger following community then anything I've ever experienced with WordPress. For example, I had an article go viral on Medium, and it was viewed over 9 million times.

Granted, I gave up on WordPress.com a while ago, I don't believe the capacity to reach that many people is available. WordPress.com lacks promotion and community outreach functionality and capacity, and doesn't seem to have any curated or algorithmic content matching (unless this stuff was added recently?).

Medium does its best to match your content with readers who might be interested, and that simply has not been my experience with WordPress.

What is also interesting about Medium is how it handles "responses" as unique sets of content to have a threaded public conversation. Essentially comments are equal posts types to the main article itself, and can be liked, shared, and generate their own traffic. This extra layer of communication and post type recognition blows WordPress commenting out of the water. Sometimes the "comments" or "responses" end up getting just as much traction as the original article. Something once again that can't happen with WordPress.

If WordPress wants to compete with Medium, they're going to have to radically change their approach.