The thing with this is that it will take a HUGE amount of money to do this, unless you're suggesting they'll replace them with new unpaid moderators that are pro-being abused for free labor.
If that's the case, the quality of those subreddits will tank fast because there's no way they'll replace the existing mods with ones as motivated or as experienced as the ones already there.
As much as people love to mock Subreddit Moderators, there's a definite learned skill to doing it well and keeping a community thriving. That's not going to be something easily replaced.
personally it's a little hard for me to believe that reddit admins are hellbent on making sure things are quality seeing how they're acting right now. :p
But that's the problem. It's easy to find people who will abuse their mod position. It's harder to find people who will use their mod powers fairly. If the mods in a subreddit - who use their powers fairly to help foster the community - are replaced by power seeking mods who just want to force their views on everyone, then the community will suffer. People will leave and the subreddit will slowly degrade.
So Reddit could definitely replace all the protesting mods with power seeking folks. Reddit will even see a short term gain with the subreddits opened again. However, it will just reinforce people's negative views of mods and will hasten Reddit's decline.
If they replace protesting mods then the communities can just overload the new mods until they restrict the sub (again). The real problem is people giving up (which just so aligns with what reddit wants). Personally, that's the reason why I'm leaving because apparently a lot of people genuinely thought that a 2-day blackout would cut it. Yeah, right.