The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators

I mean YouTube comment sections were known for years to be an unmoderated nightmare of just people saying the absolute dumbest shit.

YouTube was and still is the most popular video site.

I think reddit has just stopped caring about the real content of the comments since, like you said, they've pretty much pivoted to images and video. Expect the comments section to be further eroded as well, in the name of needing less moderation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit do an "AI" push where the "AI" is mostly just replacing moderators with what amounts to a more advanced automod.