The thing I find weird is that they essentially paid money to degrade the user experience to the extent that large parts of previously OK functionality don't work anymore, and subreddit mods typically advise people to use the 'old' UI.

I mean, the new UI is not to my taste, but it is also just really buggy, slow, and full of things that straightforwardly don't work (videos, search, etc).

Now, I'm not an MBA, but I don't really get how you make money by paying developers to degrade your service.