From my experience it's not necessary that publications with bigger following would give you more reads if you publish there. Sometimes they take very long time to publish. There are times they wouldn't even let you know.
There are some old publications if you open their page and look at the engagement on their articles it's hardly anything compared to some below 1000 followers publications. I published just one article for the startup. It took me multiple wasted efforts to publish one. Now I have started trying to publish at least 2-3 a day. So I can't afford to wait for 32 hours just to get a response. That too no guarantee that it would be published. If you have started to build a community of readers I too believe self publishing wouldn't be a bad idea some times. We anyways waste some time even thinking where to publish.