The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Gizmodo's metric for success is that "The last major holdouts in the massive protest against Reddit’s controversial API pricing have relented, abandoning the so-called 'John Oliver rules' which only allowed posts featuring the beloved TV host in certain dissident subreddits."
The traffic indeed increased. It was the same for twitter too. Elon did report that twitter usage is at an all time high now.
The main reason is probably people getting interested in controversy. E.g. me. I was visiting reddit maybe once a month, but after these changes, I was visiting it daily.