Easy question to answer: they aren't profitable and the free money of years of near 0 or 0% interest rates is over. The constant VC dried up and the website is insolvent. They have a massively bloated staff roster. They're going to die if they don't make a major change.

And at the same time, all "traditional" monetization strategies for websites like these just... don't work with the way Reddit works. Making the changes they need to make will kill the site.

They never cooked up a monetization strategy that would work for them. They procrastinated. They felt free money would continue forever and underestimated how reliant their site was on volunteer labor. They got distracted by stupid side projects instead of refining the core product.

Reddit will absolutely survive all this. I expect it to still exist, at the end of the day. But it'll be smaller, and what remains will be a soulless shit hole. And it'll still be borderline insolvent.