It is strange. The obvious solution to Reddit's revenue problem was to build a marketplace into the foundation of the network, and they should have done that more than a decade ago.

Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.