I am currently also facing big earning drops since the beginning of August. Yes, my views are a bit down compared to the previous weeks, but that should not explain why I am earning less than $1 a day while it were around $5 last month. Overall, I expected this to happen to my earnings because of all the reasons you mention. Tech articles don't benefit from this system, I have 75% external readers that don't count, engagement is rather low except some occasional claps, so yeah ... Don't put all your eggs in the Medium basket if you are a tech writer :)