I use Medium sporadically, and I think it's a good platform to use if you don't already have an audience, since it's easy to repost to larger publications and gain distribution.
Once you gain an audience, or if you already have one, then using an open source platform is the way to go.
WordPress is probably the best choice, since the ecosystem is just so much larger than anything else out there. I would really suggest finding a managed service over deploying it on an ec2 instance or something. Security is a constant battle on WordPress sites, and it's just better to have someone else deal with that.
If you don't care about distribution or growing an audience and are just blogging for fun, then something like Hugo might be a good choice.
If it helps, I’ve used Redux in a couple production apps and loved it. Boilerplate can be a bit tedious at times, but in exchange you get a lot of sanity and clarity in your code.
There has certainly been a lot of anti-vaping money backing ballot measures like the recent one in SF. I’ve been meaning to look into who is actually funding this. The tobacco companies seem to be on board with the trend and many are manufacturing their own devices. What’s bad for Juul would likely be bad for them too.
This is spot on. It's just like any other marketing tactic - it works well until everyone else starts doing it.
As for the pricing of posts, the lowballing is getting more and more dramatic, because there are many more "influencers" now. The only brands really shelling out are large corporations with large budgets looking for something very specific. Smaller brands can just reach out to a bunch of influencers offering only product in exchange for a post, and someone will say yes.
I can say from experience that an Instagrammer with 100k followers is unlikely to get anything near $2700 to post a photo. This was probably true several years ago, but these days the number is closer to $1000.