I remember the clean design phase. It's easy to forget, but back then medium was really impressive. Their design team posted an article about quotation marks in 2015 and I still remember it today:
I don't have the link handy, but I also remember their team posting about how the process of creating the underlines for their hyperlinks and thinking how interesting it was to see all the thought and process they had out into it.
https://medium.design/quotation-marks-c8993b54417c