Thing is, I am much more loyal to the mods of my favorite subs, then I'm to reddit. And my guess is, that is the case with a lot of the power users.
Censorship, power-tripping, running subs with a iron fist, etc
Nobody knows or cares who they are.
As much as they'd like to think they are, the mods are not the community. The community is the people. The people are not there for the mods.
That said, if you thing mods are not the community you are more than welcome to try and run a community without mods. In fact you should do so right now. Go create a subreddit without mods and link it here.
Mods are the stewards of the community. Not the community itself.
They help foster a good community, but once again - they are not the community and can usually easily be replaced by someone else in the community who is passionate about the topic.
> Each sub is going to have a different set of mods, some worse than others.
The problem is that the main group of people driving this 'protest' are the Reddit power mods.
Smaller communities with great mods have been strong-armed into this protest and have no idea why they are actually participating, because as per usual, Reddit power mods need to control the narrative and want people to believe that "Reddit is nothing without them".