If the issue was essentially the AI scraping, then Reddit could have provided tiered pricing and ensured that Apollo (and other important third-party apps and services) could have easily afforded it while still paywalling the heavy-duty scrapers. Instead, they've chosen to shoot themselves (and their users, and their moderators) in the foot without even bothering to look for an alternative, equitable solution.
Just because you've got the right to charge for access, doesn't mean that it's in your best interests to do so, certainly not in a way that punishes the people without whom your product/service has no inherent value.
This is all about trust, and Reddit (along with Twitter) appears to have spent the past months doing everything they can to burn it as fast as possible:
The Trust Thermocline Explains How Companies “Suddenly” Lose Customers And Employees