A lot of those mods held polls in their communities and among their peers before going dark. I don't think the large subreddits are getting unilaterally shut down.
Reddit has much bigger problems to solve. First and foremost, that users have no recourse from moderation abuses, and this is killing the community more than the API changes.
None of the subs i know did
Looking at the comments in this thread it doesn't feel like a democratic decision: https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/148xygd/rstarwars...
Not participating in subreddits with crappy moderators seems like pretty good recourse?