It’s been a long time since I payed attention to Reddit drama, but isnt Reddit dominated by maybe a dozen or so power mods that have an enormous amount of influence in what goes on on that site?
No, and hasn’t been close to as you describe in a long time. Reddit made these people give up some of the subreddits that were on the old defaults list. The truth is that this generation of Reddit user is long gone; see /u/qgyh2 or /u/ManWithoutModem.