I have like three now, because it wasn't clear that that wasn't required. I think I'm getting it more now, but it's taking a bit to get there.

This is it in a nutshell, without any "late stage capitalism" nonsense.

Reddit, like Twitter and other prominent tech companies, was supported largely by outside investment. The company didn't make a profit, but investors continued to put money into it in hopes that it would eventually net them a return. Low interest rates make investment capital easy to come by and relatively low risk, but higher borrowing rates have dried up a lot of that funding. This forces the company to find other ways of sustaining itself.

It's certainly less user friendly than Reddit, particularly with respect to how communities are organized. The more I browse, the more I'm understanding how things are structured, but I don't know that I'll ever prefer it.

The biggest obstacle that I can see is, with the way that communities are spread between servers, there is no one definitive version of anything at this point. Which "memes" community is the memes community? Maybe it's preferable that there isn't one, but it will dampen growth for many people.

I don't think there was ever any illusion that reddit or Twitter were operating as charitable organizations, or even as non-profits.

It's probably just a relic of tech entrepreneurs being programmers rather than businesspeople, but there certainly is a real aversion to just boring, reliable profitably over time.

You're not wrong. It seems that some people are inevitably always going to be under that illusion.