As someone who was invited to that first group and told them to go fuck themselves, it’s actually mostly people who have participated in reddit surveys and reddit mod meetups (where mods from a local area get blasted on Huffman’s dime). Almost every mod that I know that went to one of these events got an invite and all of them gave similar answers to me.
Also, 200k karma isn’t a ton. It likely places you in the top 1%, but most people don’t participate anyways. I had over 300k (I think, I’m not checking) and maybe 1k was from a single post. Everything else was from the occasional comment
For the first group though they didn’t actually bother to look into them. The 2 subs I ran have both been private since the last priest despite numerous warnings that I’d be removed if I didn’t make them public. And my subs participated in numerous protests before then.