The way that Christian and other developers were treated by reddit, their administrative team, and their CEO, is just abhorrent. There's no justification to explain their behavior. It's just so cold. To attack someone from a position of power for simply defending themselves, after attacking them for a mutually beneficial compromise, is just morally bankrupt behavior.
I don't blame him (and others) for just wanting to stop the relationship with reddit. Even if they backpedaled, there would be no trust left.
Reddit relies almost exclusively on hobbyists and volunteers to both manage, moderate, and create content for the site. They've burned a lot of bridges with this stunt by blatantly giving the finger to a bunch of those hobbyists and volunteers.
I suspect reddit will survive as long as subreddits come back and won't go dark indefinitely. Karmafarmers, reposters, actual OC content creators and bots need to delete themselves from that platform as well. Are majority of people going to do that? I seriously doubt that. Considering that majority of subreddits that have gone dark have decided to only do it for a few days speaks volumes what will happen next.
The people who don't understand or care about whats going on will stay, and they will consume the influencer style content that is going to hang around and fill the void. Reddit wants profit, so its changing to a model where they have end to end control and stripping the 3rd party development and modification.
Hopefully the development community packs up and moves to the fediverse.