I understand your frustration. Technically, I am new to Medium. I say technically because I started medium in March-April 2020 and left May 2020. I lurked here and there. Read a few things and returned Sept. 2021, nearly 18 months later. So yeah, I'm still a newbie, sort of.

From the way it was explained to me, Medium pays you based on subscription. Say that Jane pays the $5.00 subscription fee, but she was referred by Paul. Well Paul gets his $2.70 (I think that's how much the referral fee payment is). Now Jane's remainder $2.30 pays royalties to all her readers (of course some monies go to medium).

The rest gets split up among all the writers Jane reads according to the read time or the time she spends reading the post. If she spends 1 minute reading Edna's post and 3 minutes reading Luke's post then look gets more of a cut of Janes subscription fee.

Now, this is based on how it was explained to me by one of the Top Writers here. I could be totally wrong.