That was my case, and I 100% believe that is one of the factors.

I follow closely one of the Medium writers who has a YouTube channel and complains A LOT of the stats going down, but guess what, that writer has the notifications turned down and never ever reads any comment nr his stories. I doubt she even uses the platform to read other stories... Recently she asked in a video something like "How can I have only 100 views in this story, none of my 2k followers wants to read this?". I felt like screaming "If you actually communicate with them, besides only trying to impose what you feel like writing you would know the answer". I believe many top writers were used to be successful without pushing as much effort as they believe they do. The content is repetitive - they write tons of similar listicles and started to write about having success on the platform and the audience just gets tired of reading the same things over and over.