I think that this is 10+ years of resentment on the part of Reddit's users against Reddit itself coming home to roost. The perception of Reddit's attitude to users for a long time now has been "well, we're making all these user-hostile changes, and we don't care what you think about it, peasant. You can just shut up and keep using old.reddit.com as long as we feel like giving you permission to do so, but one day that'll end too." I think for a lot of people this latest drama is just the last straw.