spez decided to kill it in a few weeks. Over a decade of progress will be gone.

Let's be fair- Spez has been killing Reddit for much longer than a few weeks. Look at the features that get developed and those that don't- users are screaming for better mod tools and better mobile app and we get chat and avatars and NFTs. Look at how Reddit bought alienblue and then wrecked it, look at the whole 'new reddit' site design and the feed stuffed full of 'engagement algorithm' garbage from subs you've never visited. This is the same shit that's been going on for the last few years.
If you're like me, it never bothered you much because you could always work around it- old.reddit.com on desktop, i.reddit.com or 3rd party app on mobile, RES plugin. And that's what they said- they'd always let users use Reddit as they wanted.
But suddenly i.reddit.com dies and 3rd party apps die a month later (no way that's a coincidence) and now there's no way for a mobile user to effectively use the site. So users draw a hard line in the sand and say 'this far, no further, the line must be drawn HERE'. But things were going downhill long before this API mess.

I've been on Reddit since before the Digg migration, it's been my home for like 12 years. In its heyday it was a truly beautiful community. 'The narwhal bacons at midnight' may have been the cheeziest line ever, but I think that was around the peak of Reddit's greatness.
But I don't think progress is gone. I think those of us that protest the API mess, those of us who don't use the official apps or new reddit, I think we all now understand exactly what we want and don't. In a sense, I think we're collectively growing up- realizing that being the product for advertisers isn't a recipe for success, that if we want to have good communities we have to build them ourselves rather than going the lazy way and letting Big Tech build them for us in exchange for tracking us.