Reddit management already did this when they began self-hosting all images and videos. It's pretty disingenuous to complain about excessive API call costs when you voluntarily decided to pay for hosting and streaming Petabytes of video and images.
The redesign is basically unusable for me. And it's astounding how much data it has to pull down compared to old.reddit.com even with ads blocked just to load a page.
Like, it's just really shoddy work from the ground up. If hosting really was the problem, there's a LOT of lower lying fruit for them to clean up.