All fair points. It took me several years to break $1000 in a single month. And I’ve only done that a few times. I think my max per month was around $1500. You have to be producing 7 - 10 articles per month, minimum. And you need to get about 30% of those distributed, which means they need to be good quality and adhere to some of Medium’s unwritten norms (short paragraphs, catchy cover images, etc).

I made about $7000 all told last year, but I doubt I’ll match that this year because I just don’t have the time to produce that kind of output anymore.