Generally speaking, I love 'new' stuff, and even welcome non-backwards-compatible breaks with the old to get rid of cruft/legacy issues. But with the Reddit redesign I definitely feel that it goes way beyond that and instead does a whole lot of things that seem more 'state of the art front-end bandwagon-ey' than is prudent.
Basically, I get the impression that while the redesign might include a whole bunch of stuff that redditors have been asking for, it's primarily not made with that target audience in mind. Who the actual target audience is I'm not sure, but I imagine their interests don't align with most users. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
(and honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the actual target audience is 'front-end reddit devs who like to use the coolest newest stuff')