I hear you and understand your frustration. Ultimately it comes down to Medium doing whatever is best for Medium as a whole. Yes, Medium needs writers to supply good content so it is in their interest to keep us happy, but they make their money on readers. A lot of traffic comes to Medium from outside the platform. Medium has one goal and one goal only for those readers: convert them to paying members. Medium wants the reader to get to the end of the story and then click on a new one. They don't care whose story it is so long as the outside reader keeps reading, gets to the paywall and subscribes or at least goes away and comes back another day already with the idea in their head, Medium has interesting stuff.

As writers we need to keep the Medium ecosystem healthy. The more fantastic writers publishing here the more subscribers. The more subscribers the more money Medium has to dole out and the more potential paying readers for my story.

If I lose someone to a distracting link, its frustrating but the nature of the game.