This is spot on. People assume Vimeo is the only competitor to YouTube, but that's wrong. Reddit is a perfectly fine competitor to YouTube in a sense that people don't really need the content to come in form of video.
Thats like compairing backroom gossip to news. Sure both have their biases and inaccuracies, but at least one of them holds a resemblance of accountability as opposed to the other that can spew anonymous bogus crap at will. With zero consequence.
Reddit has very poor quality content. And it keeos on getting worse. Its just too riddled with bots. Imagine youtubes comment section without the videos. Reddit in a nutshell.
Yeah, stay far away from the most popular subs. The traffic is insane and there's no time to form any kind of community.
But you can find very good quality subreddits.
Small subs are often better, because the mods haven't burned out yet and people know each other.
And there's gems like /r/AskHistorians. Moderated with an iron fist, quality content is the only thing to be found there.