Unfortunately, I don’t see Reddit going back on this. Unfortunately, I don’t think Reddit will die because of this. They are bigger than this, and the community will just migrate from the people who are affected by this decision to those who are not. Just as it happened with every controversial decision reddit took in the last decade. From migrating from links only to allow commenting, migrating from unobtrusive and static ads only, to incorporating in line ads, from the various different views on speech to the decisions regarding site moderation and administration (different from the other examples, this one I agree with), to the redesign and so on. The site simply drifted to a different steady state of users and communities, and I guess this will also happen here.
I'm not so sure, there's a base of Reddit users who submit 80 percent of content and comments and do the moderation, this is maybe 10 percent of the entire user base. If they lost this base the quality of content would plunge and people would start getting board and look for something better.