The "If it's on substack, it's not a real blog, it's just sparkling page bloat" take is a little strained for me.

The content is great. The tool gives writers a low-friction mechanism to charge for premium content, and works on most people's devices. I would rather have read this on substack, than the author get frustrated at having to learn how to publish pages by hand and give up.

Maybe we just need a better alternative to substack if that's the problem.