I don’t think users are powerless. All these shenanigans are hurting Reddit, otherwise they wouldn’t be trying so hard to shut it down.
I think it might feel like that because Reddit made a sadly rare good decision in deciding to stay quiet and out of the press, as it casts doubt on how effective dissent is.
But it’s clear from the continued pressure on mods and the fairly drastic action to arrest the nsfw trend that the fallout is way worse than they anticipated and they’re just doing damage control.
They can stay out of the press, but they have to keep acting if they want to salvage anything of their site and those actions will be of a strike-breaking nature likely to generate press on their own.