Yes, those stories are in general distribution, unless/until removed automatically/on review by staff because they contain erotica/AI/Medium meta content, etc.

But I don't think one can talk about 'the algorithm' as a single thing functioning in a single way. Different feeds and pages display different content based on different criteria.

With the topic recommendations (which were always crap, and simply based on 'recent post with this tag') and especially the 'Who to follow', they recently made several algorithmic changes.

For example, I had, for some months, been in the Top 5 for 'Spain' and 'Language'. After the recent changes, I disappeared, and was replaced by a removals van hire company. They screwed up. They are clearly now trying to fix it - as of today I have returned to the Top 5, but others are still not there.

Illumination is recommended for Language - this is clearly dumb. No one follows Illumination for any topic, as it's simply a mishmash of stuff.

They have tried to refine the 'Who to follow' recommends, and messed up.

That is all that is going on here, I think. It didn't affect what people saw in their 'For you' or 'Following' feeds.

I don't think any user can 'know' what happens behind the scenes at Medium, either curated or automated, as they deliberately conceal their workings.

Nor do I think it helps to think of 'the algorithm'. There are different functions drawing on different (overlapping) data sets to distribute content in different ways, in different places, and according to different criteria, as we can see in the results we encounter when accessing different feeds and pages on the site.