I think so. There was a phase where there was clean design + many high-profile users pushing it a bit above other platforms. Nowadays clean design is more commonplace, they ruined their own design, more low-quality content, ... push them far down.
I remember the clean design phase. It's easy to forget, but back then medium was really impressive. Their design team posted an article about quotation marks in 2015 and I still remember it today:
I don't have the link handy, but I also remember their team posting about how the process of creating the underlines for their hyperlinks and thinking how interesting it was to see all the thought and process they had out into it.
