Because reddit is a terrible company and you don't want to subsidize their transition into a shitty ad service.
99.999% of redditors will never ever have to deal with a Reddit employee. Cronyism? What the hell has that got to do with my consumption of and participation on Reddit?
I've been a mod for a decade and never had a problem with admins.
Regardless, the attitude that they're "god" is a weird way to put it. They randomly IP banned me for calling out an admin's publicity issue during an April fools event. That's cronyism. I've used Reddit for 12 years and engaged in conversations in good faith for years. Paid for subscriptions most of that time. All relationships, business or otherwise should be mutual in some form.