They are probably reverting to a backup copy they have from before the protest started. Not just simply undeleting the comment.

Honestly, I think people should keep their accounts so they can redo the post and comment edits and/or deletes if necessary.

I don’t trust reddit reporting that value accurately. Not saying it is a huge percentage, but they likely doing some things to minimize the numerator and maximize the denominator.

But yeah, definitely about control. They could have monetized users on third party apps with more reasonable API pricing. People would probably have barely noticed and that’d be new revenue for reddit that didn’t exist before.