Fans are a pretty horrible engagement metric. Reads and Read Ratio are probably better — your protestations aside.

However, fans seem to be the go-to metric for making money here — so it is in a writer's best interest to focus on increasing their follower count to increase their fans for any given article.

I’ve read Medium enough to know that “quality writing” isn’t what’s going to determine who is going to clap for you or not. Medium is very similar to social media that way.