Worse when you find out there’s a couple dozen of the same moderators running nearly all the top 500 subreddits.
But they are paid.
There's much worse that's "pure speculation", because a few thousand unemployed losers that nonetheless have six figure incomes aren't suspicious at all. See the kerfuffle when the mod of r/antiwork went on Fox News, where several of the other power mods alluded to their true incomes and professions (they know what they are - PR people) when trying to boast about how they'd have done better.