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Framing it as "give me money and I'll stop making things difficult for you" is disingenuous. The proper framing was "buy the app out and the API usage, and thus the $20mm/year in costs, will stop, or whatever you want to do with the product at that point".

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The API usage cost still exists, it doesn't just disappear if it's owned by Reddit instead of the dev

Reddit said the majority of the lost revenue was in opportunity cost (money they could have made from those users if they were using the official app), not the literal cost of maintaining the API. So the idea is that they would buy the app, then could serve ads to those users (or however else they monetize users on the official app) and recoup the opportunity cost.

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