> What the moderators see is already after the core platform has removed the most obvious offenders.

This might be true.

> Most of what the volunteer moderators do is remove content that they feel is not in line with their community.

This is certainly not true for my sub. There's a lot of obvious spam that has to be manually removed. For example, if Reddit enforced the selfpromotion ratio rule programmatically, there'd be an order of magnitude less spam to deal with.

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Unless Reddit cranks up the removal rate, moderators are still necessary or the /new feed will drown in spam. If /new drowns in spam, what reaches the top will become a lot more chaotic.