> I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private

really?!?!? I find that surprising given that something like <1% of the subreddits have gone private. Are you blown away because it's so few? Honestly, given that mods have the power and people with no life love to mod like 10s-100s of subreddits, this could be something like a protest of 100s of people who happen to control lots of subreddits.

Honestly, these mods only have the power to do this because other people don't care enough to deal with the bullshit that mods have to. While reddit needs mods, it doesn't necessarily need these mods.