No there is a war between Reddit management and a number of Reddit users. A certain proportion of users do not care about the API at all.
Redditors are being used as pawns by the third party devs in their fight to maintain their free loading existence. Which was easy, social media is good at riling up people for made up reasons.
Reddit has several hundred million users, and even more anonymous visitors. The two biggest third party apps have 1.5M users combined.