don't mix "there are crappy mods out there" with "all mods are crappy". it's not even close. the reason reddit runs is because of all the unpaid mod labor.
reddit should just fucking moderate all subs themselves and after that they can do whatever the fuck they want. what? that's expensive AF and comes with liability? what? you want to eat the cake and also keep the cake? that's cute!
How are the users supposed to gauge the work of mods? Most users don't even know the difference between a comment that was removed by the mods or by the user itself and blame it always on the mods, even though Reddit shows it with message (of course not in a clearly understandable way, this is Reddit after all with horrific UI and UX even though users have been complaining for years).
As a mod I often pointed the users to pushshift to see what has been removed so they could see for themselves. Thank you Reddit for taking this clarification from us.
I could have worked around it. I started archiving thematically similar subreddits myself but it is something that I gladly outsourced and have paid money for instead of doing it myself in an half assed way. And I am a programmer, so I can do such things. Lots of other mods aren't and can't do similar things.
Expect lower quality modding (some people will LOL and ask 'even lower?') because of this changes.
That I had to pay a 3rd party instead of Reddit is not the fault of the 3rd party. They provided a service that Reddit never did.
What I learned in the last years is that it's misleading that the down- and upvote button is enough. Especially as so many users use the downvote button as "I don't agree with this comment" instead of the intended "this does not belong on this subreddit" and no amount of educating the users help.