> I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress
Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a company that claims to displace Wordpress it's not unthinkable for it to raise hundreds of millions.
You're conflating two very different things. WordPress.org is open source software that runs a substantial portion of the modern web and do all those things you say. WordPress.com is a hosted blogging SaaS like Blogger. Medium is a WordPress.com competitor, a very important distinction.
The point remains; given the size of Automattic/Wordpress.com, it is very understandable how a wordpress.com competitor founded by the creator of blogger could raise large sums of money.
Probably more accurate to say that Medium is a glorified Blogger. I'd argue that the two are better at different things and I sometimes cross-post from Blogger to Medium.
But what I find a bit silly is that Medium often gets held up as a journalistic enterprise when it's just a publishing platform, albeit a nice one.
The linked article answers why Medium sometimes gets held up as a journalistic enterprise--at some points, as they've flailed around for business models, they've directly paid writers and editors for content, and at other points they've courted other publications to either move to Medium wholesale or provide exclusive content for them. WordPress sees their technology platform as the core of their business. Medium seems to see their technology platform as a means to an end; they just can't figure out what that end is.
And Medium doesn't charge anything to let you put a domain over your writing. Automattic's services are a poor deal for everyone except the very few people who make significant money through their writing and need a lot of customization, but don't want the headache of running their own WordPress.org install.
