And the enshittification continues.
On the other hand, you can’t run a heavily trafficked website without any revenue. It’s very unlikely more than a tiny fraction of their users will pay any amount to use Reddit. They need advertising. In that situation, Reddit has to be partially accountable to their advertisers. The advertisers will want some measure of control over who sees the ads and some reporting on performance. I get that no one likes ads but…
I'd keep it from being expensive to host to begin with. I wouldn't try to roll my own video player nor image hosting since I started as an aggregator where people were okay using external links. I wouldn't grow the website to the point of 2000+ employees to do... well, whatever reddit was trying to maximize profits. I also wouldn't kick out attempts for others to provide functionality that other power users may enjoy. Heck, I don't even think Reddit Gold is a bad idea (engaged users paying for a "super vote" that puts shiny things next to a post but has relatively small effects on the actual voting algorithm. Perfect), but I wouldn't axe it and then try to make a program where people are incentivized to further spam low quality content for money.
I'm not saying you don't require a lot of staff to maintain such a site. But for some reference, Wikipedia is ~400 employees and that sounds much more reasonable to maintain a top site with very little dynamic content. But the attitude of tech companies isn't to be satisfied with modest profits. So I don't have much sympathy here.