I am in some "community" subreddits and moderators are just there to enforce the rules that they made up and not everybody necessarily agree with. As an example, it's very common to have vague rules that silence some flavour of on-topic conversations... and then they are arbitrarily enforced, depending on whether the mod likes or dislikes where the conversation is going.
In my opinion, if mods from small subs were gone, that would be a huge positive. I'm glad that this abusive relationship of mods who think they own the entire community (including the users) and treat it as their fiefdom is coming to an end. Just the fact that they are shutting down entire communities shows the level of entitlement they have over the community they moderate. Doing a lot of unpaid labour doesn't entitle you to anything, but it does indeed show the kind of person that you are.