Hm, they must have changed how the site works. A while ago, I decided to simply skip any medium.com link posted to HN, because a) it was a crap experience reading on mobile, b) it was a crap experience reading with javascript disabled and c) with javascript enabled, the site was too annoying
When I say "it works fine" I mean "the text is on the page and in a reasonable font". There is a huge amount of wasted space in terms of crap content (banners, etc - all mangled because there is no JS) there, which would be annoying on mobile. This experience (in my mind) competes with websites that will not show the content at all without JS, which is not a high bar.