Counterpoint: Google already gives priority to recency, and it heavily rewards "flip shop" sites that essentially plagiarize existing content. The original researchers/authors who did the leg work get buried in lazy rewrites.
Due credit is not the only thing misplaced; the author who did the legwork is also, by virtue of their legitimate interest in their subject, a better prose stylist. Interesting, readable writing has to be more relevant to a search query than what the content farm produces.
I assume this is reddit trying to game the recency metric.
Another consequence of the redesign, much worse than useless dates, is that you get completely useless results just because the same "related post" (the title of which Google happens to deem "relevant") appears over and over again at the bottom of different pages.
To get around this you can search for "site:old.reddit.com" or "site:i.reddit.com". One downside is you get fewer results.