I have a different take: The main problem with reddit is in how badly it's bungled its several different redesigns over the last few years, and how it's slowly ruined its users' experience in misguided attempts to drive mobile traffic to its app.
Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app:
1. Navigate to subreddit. Find out which of two (non-NSFW) or three (NSFW) "experiences" reddit decides to give me on mobile.
2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random "get the app!" prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app.
3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of "unapproved" non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in before the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it's blocked.)
4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.
Desktop isn't much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue.
If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I'd probably stop browsing the site within weeks.
It's a death knell when someone creates an alternative frontend for your website because the usability is so bad. Libreddit did just that for Reddit. It fixes/removes all the bullshit that Reddit introduced in the last 10 years.