In Russian there's a saying that can be translated as "doorman (or consiege/bouncer) syndrome", where an otherwise pitiful person (a doorman controlling access to some venue, more common in Soviet union even for e.g. dorms) has a little bit of local power and discretion and uses it in at best arbitrary, and at worst actively malicious and power-trippy way, because they can. That's your average /vocal/ internet moderator.
A good example from Reddit is recent /r/comicbooks case where any mention of Rippaverse comics were being removed and users banned because one of the mods disagrees with the author's right-libertarian politics. It's even worse in Facebook groups where I've seen mods remove users for no reason, including someone who happened to create/join the mod team on the first major city-wide board-gaming group banning a bunch of people explicitly over politics (not discussing politics in the group, just having wrong politics at all), because "it's muh group!" (pretty much an actual quote)
Why would reddit stand for losers on a power trip controlling a community for a popular topic on their property, just because they were "there first"? It makes no sense. I totally buy an argument that most users just want to participate, and they only need mods to maintain the manners and clean up spam.
Reddit should just kick all the mods out from the major/general-purpose/large-geographical-entity subreddits, and have paid mods to do the above.