I actually sent spez a private message on my way out, calling out what an arrogant hypocrite he is. He probably won't ever read it, but man it felt good writing it.
@v13 Here's what I wrote to him, in case you're interested.
Dear /u/Spez,
I am tired of the value I provide as a contributor and user of Reddit not being fairly compensated while Reddit makes money. I'm gone until I start getting more money than you do for my content. It's not fair that you should be making money for something I freely provide.
Yeah, that's YOUR argument, funny how it doesn't go both ways, isn't it? You're such a hypocrite, and your ego has killed any desire for me to interact with Reddit anymore. You provide infrastructure, and you provide a name brand, and that's all you provide you arrogant little man. Your users provide all the value to Reddit, and they don't get paid either. Stop acting like you provide any fucking value, because you don't. You are pathetic.
If you live in EU or California it's also worth it to send an official GDPR or CPRA request after deletion; I believe the request form is under account privacy settings. This should ensure they are not changing the state of the data you've erased (in case they have it backed up elsewhere). If they are found to be falsifying this it would be class action lawsuits with hefty fines.
I'm currently removing everything associated with my account with a fork of PowerDeleteSuite. This fork has a delay of 5.1 seconds per comment so as to not exceed reddit's rate limit of editing/deleting comments too quickly. I'm curious to see if my comments magically reappear after some time. If anyone is interested: https://github.com/gbf-dtb/PowerDeleteSuite
I saw another thread where many people were reporting their overwritten comments were reversed and returned to the original, even after multiple attempts. There's speculation about European GDPR violations. I'd definitely document your actions and if you find that they've undeleted your posts note that in the event of future class action lawsuits.
Technically they can do this. There are well known backups outside of reddit, so from a tech perspective, even if Reddit lack its own backups, it could easily utilise a different public backup.
However, it's been pointed out in other threads that there are numerous legal barriers to them doing so.