Subreddits have banned people for activities that users do in other subreddits since long before the API changes. Reddit was bad, long before the API changes. The writing was on the wall when they first changed how votes were displayed, its what started the mass trend up karma farming. There used to be a lot of novelty accounts going around, the small user base kept things grounded and on topic. Then users like gallowboob took over, flooded the site with repost after repost, farming karma, other users began doing the same and now its nothing more than karma hell.

Comment threads are rarely helpful, usually full of trolling, or pun threads, or jokes, or other useless unhelpful crap.

Once a community, any community, becames large enough, the quality of the output drops. If you have 10000 users in a sub/community, and only a couple hundred that actually like the topic, the trolls and the off topic karma whores will take over. Low effort, low skill, low floor, low ceiling. Enshitification isn’t just a word, and it didn’t just happen over night. It’s been happening for a while. The internet will never be as good as it used to be, sure we can do more, watch more, send more, download more, play more, etc. But the smaller close-knit communities that helped cause the internet to thrive in the first place are never coming back.

Enshitification and dead internet theory have made sure of that.