If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.

Hear hear. As time went on Reddit started to lose the magic it had in 10 years ago. When I was younger I thought Reddit had some of the smartest conversation online and I learned a lot from it. But the corporatization, endless repost bots, brain dead comments. I truly hope something new succeeds.