this looks more malicious than ignorance or inefficiency. they want to mimic twitter by building off of community then claiming "costs".
fuck reddit. No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos, yet they replaced imgur with their own. Why?
Honestly, this was probably one of the more reasonable features they've added. Having to upload images on an external site added a lot of friction for users, and put Imgur in an awkward spot as well when problematic content was removed from Reddit, but not from Imgur.
Their video player still sucks, though. I'm not sure how they managed to make it so bad.