Reading one of the threads about it someone lamented that "the old relationship on Reddit is dead now". It really did feel like a unique relationship between the users and management for a long time. But that much money can corrupt the best of us.
Some others might argue that the Victoria firing is what did it, but at least the admins were still showing up publicly at that point in random threads and trying to justify it to the community.
For Secret Santa, they basically just said “this doesn’t make us money, so we’re not putting any resources into it anymore.” It was made even worse by the fact that it was originally a community thing that Reddit corporate willingly took over to help manage better. And they just killed it as soon as it wasn’t generating value anymore.