This is pretty uninformed. Users have never, ever made Reddit a cent of profit. They were never meant to. The whole plan all along was to sell out. The original crew sold out to Conde Nast and got rich. Conde Nast is selling out to investors in the LLM and general AI space, who want to use all the data that Reddit's users have lovingly authored for Reddit to train their networks. The idea that upsetting the users is a problem for Reddit is as backwards as thinking that upsetting the pig is a problem for the slaughterhouse.
That was probably the goal of this whole endeavor. Make Reddit pretty for outside (who doesn't really know a lot about Reddit, other then it's name) for an IPO and let the retail investors hold the bag.