If, you are correct that…

most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else.

And, a lot of the content creators and content moderators leave, decreasing the quality of the content on reddit.

Then, these lurkers will leave the platform.

I don’t see why these folks would stay on reddit if the content decreases in quality. Especially, if we are assuming these lurkers do nothing to contribute to the content they are consuming.

It’s interesting, you actually provided great evidence which counters your original claim that reddit will not be affected by all of this bad publicity.

Let’s be honest, it isn’t “free”. The user is giving their own data to Google in order to use there services; and data is a commodity.