At a similar time as The Verge was threatened I noticed some articles changed their tune and switched to downplaying the Reddit situation. The one I recall is Gizmodo reporting that Reddit traffic was back to normal.
It'll be interesting to see how things play out at the end of this week when the 3rd Party Apps go offline, but to be honest I'm happy to say my new home is Kbin.social and don't see the need for an active Reddit account, though I may lurk from time to time if I'm looking for some particular information that's not yet on Kbin.
The game changer for Fediverse is stable mobile applications, once the Apollo shaped hole on my phone is filled I think it'll be pretty much a drop-in replacement.
This is a very non-specific statement. As a former moderator, Reddit gave us lots of metrics to measure "traffic". Site visits, unique visits, engagement.... all of these can be used to talk about "traffic". It's also not hard to spin up a couple bots, talk about site visits, not unique visits and call everything "normal".
Metrics, especially vanity metrics are very easy to twist if you have a narrative to tell. And boy, does Reddit, Inc. have a narrative to tell.
The first thing they taught us in my graduate level statistics class was:
Anyone can make a statistic that backs up their bias. You're here to learn how to accurately represent a situation with statistics, and be able to point out when others are misusing statistics