As discussed elsewhere, that might not be such a bad thing. Ramping up slowly will work much better than all of Reddit suddenly showing up at lemmy.ml and expecting it to be a fully polished* Reddit.
I remember the exodus to mastodon being a bit of a shitshow with nobody knowing how it worked, the whole network slowing to a crawl, and then a lot of them leaving a couple weeks later. It did boost the amount of users, just in a bad way.
Some of us stuck around. I'd say Mastodon is good enough and big enough. Lemmy is definitely more rough around the edges. If some of the spurned app developers end up in the Fediverse somewhere, it should help a great deal.
Thing with that though, is there was a series of events over several months that kept pushing people to mastodon. I canโt see Reddit progressively fucking up harder the way Musk did.
They likely didn't go very deep in their research. Like others mentioned they didn't go into the details of the extremely high prices of the API access price.