From the article:
"Moving to the Fediverse
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."
Fortunately something like RES doesn’t need Reddit’s blessing to exist. A browser extension that rearranges information the browser has already downloaded (to massively oversimplify what RES is doing) doesn’t need API access.
They could shut down old reddit but the only reason RES doesn’t support new reddit is that it would require rewriting the whole thing. If that was the only option, someone would eventually do it.
RES is hanging onto life with its fingernails - it’s been in maintenance mode for the past 18 months or so with only 2 people actively working on it (at its peak in 2015ish, I think this was closer to 30).
By their own admission, they wouldn’t be able to survive any major breaking changes.