The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.

There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone's realizing they've been spouting their gold from firehoses and they're being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.