It's the only avenue that redditors have to fight back. If reddit gets its value from content and engagement, then by stripping reddit of its value is the only way to hurt it.
It's very unfortunate, but redditors took the usefulness of it for granted it seems, as almost a 1 stop shop for archiving meaningful discussions. If enough discussions are destroyed, then less people will lean on it to get what they're looking for and hopefully look elsewhere.
They could have easily handled this better, but a 30 day notice and just their behavior surrounding it? I hope they suffer from it. Just the way they handled the Apollo dev should speak volumes to how much goodwill they're willing to burn for the sake of their goals.
Lemmywinks? South park reference https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Lemmiwinks
Lemmywings? Like different wings of an overall government of lemmys?
I'm not sure where I saw this but I vaguely remember the ability to view NSFW through the API if you're a mod of a subreddit. I'm a mod of a very vague subreddit me and my friends dumped memes into, so I'm anticipating possibility having access through RedReader still.