The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. The article describes it as “the official end of the battle,” which seems an overstatement to me, but it’s the certainly the end of the initial phase.
Did Reddit win? Time will tell!
Everything you described in the second paragraph is exactly why appending
site:reddit.com
is a thing, it’s a source of genuine discussion of products and expertise. That is what gives Reddit its SEO power in search engines and if those communities go, Reddit doesn’t have much to fall back on. Meme level fluff can be replicated anywhere.