Yeah, he is doing everything that contradict what he said or set out to do just to make quick bucks and maybe so that he can pull the CEO->CEO->CEO route like many past CEOs after successfully IPO reddit. If that ever happens, what happen to reddit is no longer his concern, that's why he didn't give anything a fuck to achieve that goal.

IMO, reddit have 4 main components:

• creator: bot, repost, actual human contribution, doesn't matter who submit the link to an article. People or people that makes bot to generate enough engagement posts drive the traffic and follow comments, votes.
• active user: people that actually participate in discussion, this is what kinda make or break a reddit like env, without meaningful comments(meme or not, something that engages you), the last group will feel bored.
• mods: the people that cares for topic and sacrifice enough time to keep the community intact.
• passive consumer: people who mostly only upvote/downvote and just read the post like rss feed looking for things to make their boring time a bit more interesting.

Any user can be a combination of above when they visit different parts of the reddit, but what spez pissed off most are the "mods/active" aligned users. (if I category my reddit profile, I am like 0.5% creator, 29.5% active, 70% passive. )

Simply put, reddit won't survive with just creator and passive consumer, the community like features(asking questions/sharing tips) are essential for a sub to survive. It's not going to implode and snap away, just slowly become a bot create/bot comment/bot mod/bot upvotes farm.