Is this peer pressure? Are you trying to push drugs on me? :) If you're part of that writer's tribe, why don't you put out some writings on Medium? I suppose being an expert in being lazy--as you say you are--wouldn't help.
But yes, there's that question of authenticity, of being close to our shadow and our traumas, as writers. I've written directly on this question of whether our writing should be overtly personal, as in autobiographical. That's in fashion now on Medium, but much of that kind of writing annoys me.
If I read them at all, I'd skim those personal essays, looking for the arguments. If the article's meant to be purely rhetorical, it belongs in the prose poetry category, in which I'm judging it aesthetically as poetic, and I've written on that too. My standards would be even higher for poetry, and most personal essays aren't creative enough to deserve to be read as poems.
