I can only think of one reason: they’re panicking.
> It's reddit's ball, they can take it and go home any time they want.
While this is true, Reddit knows they are dependent on their users for their survival. That’s why they are panicking.
They have made a habit of fumbling and bumbling their way through things like this, and I don't think this is an exceptional circumstance.
This is a somewhat cynical view, admittedly, but overall, many successful companies don't need to please "users" in the same way Reddit does. They obviously make some amount from advertisers, but they need users for advertisers to advertise too.
With Reddit the majority of the value to users is not created by Reddit but by the users themselves. The only real value that Reddit provides is a platform, and it's a platform that would be fairly easy to replicate (from a technical point of view it's just a large scale CRUD app, nothing special, it's a solved problem).
The only real reason that users stick with Reddit is the network effect, but that is the biggest risk to their platform as well. If they manage to alienate enough of the most active part of their user base into moving to another platform, the same network effect with ensure the rest of them follows, taking all of the value that Reddit provides to their visitors with them, and as a result all of the value all those visitors provide to paying advertisers.
This is not as unlikely as you'd think, because only a small percentage of visitors to Reddit actively contribute.