I haven’t been to Reddit r/popular in months but… yeah, all the best people got booted out. What is left are the scabs, and the bots. So it makes total sense.
Before that, it was a different cause. Reddit itself drove a lot of it, imho, like actively making it easier to make a post while making it harder to read the rules of a community first, i.e. they promoted talking rather than listening. Oh, guess which one gives more ad revenue? Yeah, it’s the former, plus more posts are better than more comments inside megathreads, especially at the time. Places like r/Android would just devolve into almost unusability as every post was just “which phone should I get?”, despite that exact post being triplicated with practically an identical title already that very same day. The amount of human moderation required to keep that at least somewhat in check was insane, so ofc Reddit took away the ability of mods to use the tools they had developed over many years.
And now? FAAFO, we are in the “find out” stage. Well, they are:-P.