Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base.
Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data, and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with reddit.
Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay 42,000$ a month.
Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. He's always been fairly transparent about his money flow, so it's exceedingly easy for Reddit to price him out and put the fear of god into any developer interested in a Reddit client.
Ooof. I mean, if you're only an iOS user, maybe?
The others are just a-dime-a-dozen Reddit clients.
But holy hell, you must have spent exactly 0 time with Android clients, or just don't enjoy Android apps in general, cause I'd easily put Sync and Boost on equal footing as Apollo. Infinity is extremely solid as well.