It's absolutely wild that all these years later new reddit is still so bad that a sizable portion of the overall traffic fights the defaults to use old reddit. Users never fight defaults... unless you screw up as badly as new reddit did.
The best UX is usually contradictory to monetization.
The best UX takes a ton of extra work.
Why not let the Executives in Sales and Growth erect the walls and moats that keep your users stuck in place?
Actually, what if someone came up with an app that had no user created content whatsoever and was just an infinite-scroll of corporate ads? I bet it would make millions.
If you login as a user you see comments in a different style than the guest view of comments. The guest view of comments on new new reddit is even more awful.
If you're doing that often or if you're part of the "HN Crowd" it should be trivial to write a quick bookmarklet to do the re-write for you.
People don't like when someone changes their toys. But that doesn't mean that new toy is a screw up, it's not something you got used to.
Reddit code is trash. The old version is just much simpler and therefore less annoying. If it weren't for the fact that the smaller subreddits have lots of value, no one would put up with it.
I don't think it's any better now...