In theory - I like that idea a lot. However, that immediately brings up 2 concerns (curious your thoughts).
1 concern - that’s another step 1/2 of my audience would have to take an EXTRA step in order to read the article.
That creates friction, and that would cause drop off.
How much drop off becomes the question, so if we base this off of the typical website conversion after you create an extra step early in the check out process, we would be looking at a roughly 40-50% drop off.
That’s not a perfect comparison, but as far as I can tell it seems to be a fair comparison.

This brings me into my second concern.

To make the math easy, let’s say I have 1k non-member views and a current 60% view to read ratio among non members.
That’s 1k views and 600 reads.
If 40% (from the math above) of the interested viewers (those who would have become readers but stop because of the friction) drop off, that means I lose 240 reads (40% of 600 reads = 240 reads).
So now I have 1k views and 360 reads.
My views to read ratio drops from 60% to 36%.

The assumption here is that a high read to view ratio will trigger medium to push the article out more. This has so far in my experience, and medium made keeping a high view to read ratio a priority on their last update, so I believe this is a fair assumption.

My goal is to control what I can control, and the amount of friction I can create for 1/2 of my audience (which impacts my read to view ratio) is absolutely within my control.

Curious your thoughts here