I'm gonna call 'kinda' on this, Robin, from my experience.

I submit an article, to a small pub that for some reason has nomming rights. Editor says, in comments, 'Hey, I love this - I'm gonna nom it. So to make sure it gets the [my addition - frankly ridiculous] multiplier from the first read, I won't publish till I get the OK from the inhouse curators.'

Really nice of the ed in question to do it that way, much appreciated.

But the timeline from that conversation to it being confirmed as boosted and published was (and I'd have to check this but am pretty confident of my timings) maybe an hour or so, on a weekday in California office hours.

Very quick, in other words - no appreciable queue. Which rather suggests to me that the inhouse approval is more of a rubber stamp. Which also makes sense, as the idea is, as you say, to outsource the workload on the [relative- but I bet they slash it soon] cheap. Why have people genuinely poring over articles inhouse, if you're already paying the pub eds to do it?

But I think the big takeaway from all this - and thanks for your article raising it - is that the set-up suits Medium just fine, but through its lack of transparency, creates the potential for corruption/nepotism/naughtiness/whatever you want to call it, and therefore sows the seeds of discord (no pun intended) and mistrust within the writer community. And I think that is harmful. Not great for us as writers (I think I should still stick that in inverted commas for myself), but probably worse for Medium's reputation. Which you would hope they give a fuck about, right?

And damn, I still haven't joined your Discord group - I guess the free beer's been drunk by now, right? I dared to brave Mastodon yesterday - I'll build myself up to Discord soon. Before India joins the MPP...