I'm not keen on the personal essay cult that has developed more recently on Medium. It feels like when society went through that phase of reading books about child abuse. A retrograde addicton to misery porn. Any attempt to get to something of substance sitting underneath the story is washed away in a cavalcade of catharsis from other people in this shared misery department.

It looks like empowerment, feels like empowerment, but once you've read one story, you've read them all. And then... as you've pointed out, the stories continue to grow and expand and the rhetoric gets more marketable until half of Medium is like a giant glossy magazine full of trauma. It isn't empowering, a handful of writers are making money but the audiences will inevitably get bored (I know I am) and they will be left feeling like nobody cares - because, in the kindest way possible, nobody really does.