I’ve already been ignoring the extremely annoying spammy pop ups telling me to download the app for years.

I’m not downloading the app. I am just not doing it. Period.

People refusing to use their app etc. are likely a minority. Most people are completely used to being bullied into submission by tech companies, and will happily follow along.

I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.

Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.

Worse than the conversion rate, Google will most certainly deindex the Reddit pages if they are not available as webpages.

But surely Reddit has already calculated that “[search query] + Reddit” is traffic they don’t care about?