Reddit owns the servers which host the subreddits.

And reddit has allowed their users to create subs and become mods. Now they are taking this away.

Preventing users from accessing your subreddit

You may want to consider that these mods' actions are mostly what their users wanted (there have been polls and votes etc), so what they are doing now, is...

trying to control the website's overall behavior.

... is not very different from creating the sub in the first place.

So, yes, it is a high jacking attempt.

Don't confuse things. The Reddit company is the hijacker.

Giant subs have shut down before, yet Reddit never reopened them prior to June 2023. It was the coordinated action across subs that Reddit saw as a threat, not the act of closing a sub (which had never been against the rules and still isn’t). Reddit saw the protest as hijacking in the same way that other companies feel that the workers are hijacking the company when they try to unionize or strike. Only difference here is that the workers for this company are volunteers rather than paid employees.

Sure, reddit’s a private company, so they can mostly do whatever they want, but that doesn’t change the fact that these actions are unprecedented and a huge betrayal of trust, and there’s nothing wrong with people (especially those that invested a lot of time and effort into building the site into what it is today) being upset at reddit for this.

Why give moderators the ability to close a subreddit if they didn't want them to be able to close a subreddit? Using a tool that was explicitly given to you isn't isn't "hijacking".