I resisted it for the same reason as you point out for a long time even though a huge portion of the author community basically enforces it as a community norm. A lot of them won't support you unless you are a member.

What got me to come around was realizing that the case you are talking about is an edge case we don't care about. If you are just paying so you can broadcast here there a dozen reasons why you are going to end up failing. The people who do well here also read here. And so really the partner program is for people who are bought in to the entire Medium experience, not just people who are here to grind out a living.