Presumably the mods are protesting because they want a good Reddit/subreddit experience, and the new policies are hurting that. How is handing power over to someone who is supportive of Reddit's new policies helping that?
I was a former lead mod a year ago of a large subreddit. I saw the writing on the wall THEN, and took the sub private, and booted the other mods I brought in. I then started purging content.
Not a few hours later, the other 2 mods I invited in messaged the admins, and removed my moderatorship and then banned my account.
Those subreddits, no matter how many "mod kudos" you have, were never yours, are never yours, and will always be digital sharecropping.
Burn it to the ground. Power is the ONLY message the admins and C levels understand.
Otherwise, you're just burning digital books.
I'm curious to see what happens when people start following this advice (it's really the only reasonable path forward), and then what happens with the inevitable lawsuits about how reddit "owns" the content that the authors are "pirating".