I remember when Reddit started throwing the app in my face everyday until I eventually downloaded it. Now I always open for an app. Even for newspapers. The web experience on mobile blows.
I mean, Apple has every opportunity to improve their webapp experience. There's a number of PWAs I use on Android that really do "disappear into the background" when using them full-screen, I bet the experience would be just as nice on iOS if Apple was faster at adopting PWA tech and cared about making Safari an enjoyable experience.
Native iOS and Android apps are fantastic in that, as long as you're willing to follow Apple's/Google's guidelines, it's pretty easy to create great user experiences and highly maintainable software. Until the web can match that relative ease, it'll always be second-fiddle to native on mobile.
The problem with the web right now is that the tooling is a complete mess compared to native development. It feels like you end up spending 80 to 120 percent of the effort you'd put in to build two native apps, and even then the web apps would never feel as good as native.
My company strongly considered building web apps, as we move away from MVP to a more mature product, but the web tooling just isn't at the level it needs to be. The only value proposition for web was that it's easier to hire web devs.
The web experience on desktop also blows, unless you're using ad blockers; the main reason that web on mobile is worse is because people use mobile app browsers which lack decent ad blockers.
Try Firefox Android with uBlock Origin. I find it quite pleasant.
Your experience with Reddit isn't evidence that mobile web is bad, it's evidence that companies like Reddit have huge financial incentives to make you think mobile web is bad.
Not for a platform like Reddit.