I would argue that yes, the fundamental incentives are different. Traditional media relied on an advertising-based revenue model, that needed to maximize eyeballs to be attractive to advertisers. Substack relies on subscriptions, which can operate at a much smaller scale. Matthew Yglesias's 10k subscribers is not nearly enough to be attractive for an advertiser, but more than enough to support a single writer's subscription business. Through Substack, writers are incentivized to write things they think that people will pay for, not just things they think people will click on.