Mods showing up and doing something in a thread you're freely saying was about hate? You don't say! You and I both know those kinds of threads never contain the hate to just that topic, it gets evenly spread around to anyone on the "wrong" side of the argument. If some of them are employees of dealerships you know that you're talking about posts that directly target them personally right? You're not discussing hate about some faceless corporate machine; you're blithely talking about how they, their friends, their family are horrible people. I can see how they might take that a bit more personally. Imaging someone whining about not getting to constantly post about how everyone doing your job is a piece of crap. Even if we take for granted that some of them are dealership employees, do you really think they went to their boss and asked to get paid to kind of sort of defend the industry on Reddit?
Dealership arguments also inevitably bring in Tesla which is a flame-bait topic and things get heated really quickly. Mods - despite your theories - don't get paid by anyone to do what they do. They show up to browse just like everyone else and while they're there they take a few minutes to clean things up. When somebody posts a topic that inspires hate and argument and it starts drawing in hordes of people it turns into a whole lot of work. Work that again, nobody is getting paid for. So yeah, when threads turn into high-volume spewing of "you suck and this is why", it's gonna get shut down because screw that. If people want to be children and ignore rules as simple as "be civil", and "no politics", it's gonna get closed. Yes, even if you think people need the valuable public service announcement of "dealerships bad" yet again.
And how exactly were the mods representing themselves so that you consider them to be "misrepresented"? Nobody there or here is telling anyone about where they work, or what investments they might have so I don't see how they're represented in any way at all.
In my area the biggest factor is multiple families purchasing homes together. When you're splitting the mortgage it's a lot more affordable.