rewrite 95% done. I'm bedridden at the moment so I can't test for Apple support until later.... but for the most part this is how I'd go about it both in terms of rewrite, and making the accessibility fixes. I didn't add the paragraphs to the "more from" and kept them together (we should have a more from the OP, I skipped that as you didn't have it).

https://cutcodedown.com/for_others/medium_articles/mediumRewrite/template.html

The directiory:

https://cutcodedown.com/for_others/medium_articles/mediumRewrite/

Is unlocked for easy access to the gooey bits and pieces. When I'm done testing for the shit-show that is iOS and MacOS, I'll update that and put a .rar of the whole thing in there to make it easier to "just grab"

Laugh is, my HTML + CSS + Scripting is basically the same size as your markup -- but to be fair I used a webfont for more clear / visible icons so that's an extra 8k against mine. Still, 40k for html+css+js vs what? 90k or so for yours NOT counting all the extra google shmaltz yours needs?

I do have a lot more functionality. Moved search into its own modal, implemented the user menu modal, same modal code drives the response area. "Back to top" link, I made the article footer sticky, and even the "not implemented" is a styled native modal.

The modal dialogs all work without NEEDING JavaScript, though I enhanced them with JS so they don't fill up memory and you can close them with the ESC key. Same for scripting hiding the "back to top" link.

One BIG cheat I did in the JS though was the use of "facades" for the YT videos. That crap takes WAY too long to load and sucks on mobile to load three at once, so we fake a load page for each of them.

Lighthouse -- 100% across the board on desktop, same for mobile except for "best practices" stuck at 92% where the Youtube crap is a nasty case of whack-a-mole on that final 8%.

That's something that can be really frustrating about Lighthouse. It's made by Google, but if you use Google Analytics, adsense, or anything from Youtube you will NEVER get past 92% for best practices.

I'll be writing an article on it either tonight or early tomorrow.