I got banned after 12 years for saying "kill" in the context of a cat hunting for food. I appealed it and immediately got a denial. They said the decision wasn't made by a bot which means a human just straight up didn't read the comment that got me banned.

As for getting around it, it takes more effort than it's worth. They use multiple levels to enforce their bans. Beyond just an IP ban, they can see what device you're on, pixel counts of your screen, browser cache, basically your whole digital fingerprint. It's actually pretty terrifying how much information about you a website can get.

Even if you manage to evade all the technical stuff, the site can track which subs you might subscribe to, your interaction patterns, how you "talk" in comments, they got a whole profile on you. Your best bet of getting around the ban is to get a new device and move to another state. Even then if you join  multiple niche subs that your old account was subbed to they'll figure you out.

If you do it right, and clear all your cookies and caches and other identifiers you can use an anti-tracking browser like GoLogin, but most of those are subscription based and you'll have to run through a VPN and make sure you don't log in on a normal browser on accident.

Using the reddit app on your phone is out of the equation entirely.

Lemmy is a much better alternative, but there aren't a lot of people here. Hopefully reddit continues forcing their users off their platform so the population here gets bigger.