I imagine it depends on how you use it. I came to Reddit late and never got into the old interface. I commented a lot on technical subreddits and didn't do much with the doomscrolling ones.
I used Boost. Its ads were not intrusive (and I despise ads) and the UI was written with a small touchscreen in mind. If not for my distaste for phone keyboards, I'd say it was a better experience than the website on a desktop.
Would it be possible for a mobile browser to have a better experience? I don't know. I value my sanity too much to do web development. But Reddit was absolutely determined to make its mobile site unusable and the official Reddit app had a bad reputation (and I wouldn't give those bastards the satisfaction after being nagged so much to install it), so a 3rd party app was the only reasonable solution.
Unfortunately, it's getting harder and harder to hold your phone like this and see any useable amount of information. I'd love to have a 3:2 desktop monitor to replace my 16:10, but even 16:10 isn't available for phones. My current phone is 9:19, and I think I've seen 9:21. The wider the phone is, the larger percentage of precious screen space the system UI uses up when horizontal. I can see half a paragraph on my phone in landscape mode, and if it was any wider I'd never even try. As soon as I want to type something, I have to switch to portrait or I lose my view of what I'm looking at. There are terminal apps I simply cannot use because portrait mode isn't wide enough (unless I shrink the font so small I can't read it) and landscape mode I can't see anything at all. This affects some websites as well, due to their insistence on removing UI elements entirely when the device is too narrow (instead of moving them to the bottom) and others that set a ridiculously large minimum width. I far prefer tethering my phone to my tablet for this reason, which I'm lucky enough to have in 16:10 form factor.
I used Boost. Its ads were not intrusive (and I despise ads) and the UI was written with a small touchscreen in mind. If not for my distaste for phone keyboards, I'd say it was a better experience than the website on a desktop.
Would it be possible for a mobile browser to have a better experience? I don't know. I value my sanity too much to do web development. But Reddit was absolutely determined to make its mobile site unusable and the official Reddit app had a bad reputation (and I wouldn't give those bastards the satisfaction after being nagged so much to install it), so a 3rd party app was the only reasonable solution.