They do the same thing with substack and medium. Content like this doesn't really show unless you specifically search for it. While I understand where this policy is coming from, i.e., to distinguish proper outlets from blogspam. But it feels that in 2024, a lot of serious longform content has moved from traditional media to sites like the ones aforementioned.
Backlinks probably matter. Like most of my blog is findable on Google, despite being pretty far away from being a "proper outlet".
In general it's hard to for a search engine to understand the context of a website if there are few or no organic links to it. That hasn't really changed the last 30 years.
