Even smaller subreddits can be pretty terrible with bad mods.
A lot of smaller hobby subreddits are basically treated as facebook groups, with people treating it as a group for people with an interest and not a focused discussion about that interest,
Be it cars, bikes, coffee, firearms, you name it.
For hobbies I've found Tiktok is riddled with low quality content.
I suppose it really depends what you're looking for.
Discord is good but it's a chat app first and foremost and it's a pain to search for esoteric information, especially since you have to be in the server in question to even search.
Though I would also argue that one of the biggest negatives about Reddit is that you can't come back to a thread later that day or another day, if you want to get your reply head then you need to respond immediately and attain a lot of upvotes. With a forum you could respond whenever you wanted and get a discussion going. And similarly forums would allow you to avoid the echochamber effect by avoiding upvotes/downvotes as everything was chronologically ordered, so it was a much more civil affair.
But I agree that the chain-of-quotes is a positive about Reddit, which I think might be possible to implement/merge into a new forum design.