Reddit was launched 17 years ago. How many Redditors have lived with this state of affairs their entire lives - since before they were born? If Reddit's minimum age is 13, people who are
30 who signed up as soon as it appeared have never known life to be different.
(And, when Reddit was launched it was the era of the single core Pentium 4; storage and compute and bandwidth were expensive. Now they aren't. Store Reddit comments in a compressed file, they fit on a $50 SSD).