Agreed, Big Tech’s quest for UX and frictionless Interfaces has lead to a generation of people who vastly overestimate their tech savviness and are basically only great at navigating walled gardens made specifically to be easy to use.
It’s not really their fault though: in addition to frontends becoming ever easier to use, backends are also becoming increasingly complex. 20 years ago you could learn a bit of HTML and CSS and throw a decent website together, but nowadays you need to master tons of other skills (graphical design, scripting, etc.) to make even so much as a web page that won’t scare people away immediately. It’s hard to get interested in this stuff when the barrier of entry is getting higher and higher, while tons of GAFAM-made alternative are already available for “free”
As far as I remember they weren’t monetizing NSFW subs, so I guess their reasoning is that banning them reduces server costs while not impacting their ads revenue.
Now what will be interesting is to see how much of Reddit’s userbase was there at least partly for the porn, and how many users will leave Reddit altogether because of this move