The admins have been consistently disingenuous and lying to the users, through years, to the point that they might as well say “it’s a user so of course it’s stupid, it’ll believe whatever lie you throw on its snout”. It’s just that now the bullshit is so bad, but so bad, that nobody is buying it.
The same powermods being currently removed by the Reddit admins are the very powermods previously defended by the Reddit admins, as an “essential part of our community”. (For example that’s why r/the_cabal was banned.) It’s just that users be damned - the powermods outlived their usefulness for Reddit Inc…
That’s a great summary of what’s going now.
Worth noting a few long-standing tendencies: