I’m not convinced it’s just poetry. I think Medium spotlights what writers and what articles/ topics they want to get attention, outside of Medium attention to lure in more memberships. Back in the day creative writing- lit was right at the top of the page and had it’s own section for featured stories. I highly doubt they’ll bring it back though, regardless of how many of us ask them to do so.
I believe, based off my own Partner Program experience that for some reason my paywall stories get buried. I have 19K followers and if I don’t lock a story it get reads in the thousands, if I do I’m lucky if it even gets 50 views let alone reads. Shouldn’t all of my stories be reaching the same followers? I must agree with you that there’s no point.
Also, I follow you and NEVER EVER see any of your writing in my feed EVER and that makes me wonder, too. Instead my feed is filled with what I don’t want to read. The you might like section is so off base that it can’t possibly be algorithm driven because if it were the entire section would be nothing but fiction, poetry and personal essay.