The majority aren‘t bots. Most of them are legit no lifers to whom Reddit going down the drain would be a huge blow. I mean you work full time as a cashier for taco bell and you are not really happy with that situation. Some people go to school again, learn a skill… others spend all their time one Reddit stockpiling karma. Those are the people who really hate lemmy and anything that could remotely make Reddit worse, because they are heavily invested in the platform for the wrong reasons.
Their problem was they set the subreddits to NSFW but didn‘t actually post any NSFW stuff. I would have just started massposting gay pron via a bot. That rly tickles US advertisement firms and it rly hurts Reddit. But then again most mods seem attached to their community so they probably wouldn‘t do it.
I don‘t think Reddit is overall happy about the shitposts. Nobody will pay you full price to advertise in a shitpost sub. I reckon they don‘t want to pay at all for this. You wouldn’t advertise on 4chan either.