How many of Twitter's employees were convinced their company fights some righteous, on-the-right-side-of-history global battle? (Mind you: Global! It wasn't just US.) And then investors cashed out, Musk came in and discarded said employees like they were (less than) nothing.
It's the same story here, maybe a bit sadder since these mods are not even employees. They lost their time for nothing. They don't even have human connections with most anyone else since they are all anonymous and physically removed from each other. If Reddit pulls the plug all they are left with is a belief they did the right thing by wasting years to push the agenda of a corporation that showed them in absolute terms they mean nothing.
Moderation on Reddit became increasingly extremist after Trump took office in 2016. Sleazy tactics, heavy (shadow)banning of users, obscene mod & admin power trips, all perpetrated away from the public eye. There is no reliable evidence of just how much speech suppression and censorship Reddit does in practice. As someone who's been there for ~15 years, I promise you, if your regular, wide eyed, naive redditor who thinks the "communities" (a feel good word that means next to nothing in context) are all ponies and rainbows, would actually see how much abuse Reddit does day to day, the site would collapse in a week.
So now Reddit wipes its feet on some mods to make them toe the line even better than before. So what? If this gigantic Stanford experiment is killed off the world will be a better place without the shadow of a doubt.
I'm really sorry so many people take these companies at face value and gladly participate in clobbering the people who've been abused and tell their story. It's utterly disgusting and I'm heavily pro legislation to force social media companies with more than X users to keep public logs of censorship (with ids for both who applied suppression and to whom). This way the situation can be examined by any 3rd party and legal action can be taken more easily against these companies that exert immense influence on societies with zero oversight. If no social company can exist while enduring legal consequences for their actions then none should.