Default Reddit mainpage is strictly what you subscribe to. And from a tech point of view, Reddit has old. CSS, it has tree style comments with sorting and collapsing, it has no dumb character limits, and on big screens it properly fills the screen with content instead of dumb emptiness or fluff or just infogarbage (do people remember that hashtags are literally just a useless character dumps, born out of the limitations of the SMS tech).

So no, Reddit is not worse than Xitter both on social and tech merit.

Yes - community notes were a surprisingly decent alternative to more gameable authority structures.

Reddit voted itself out of my attention by requiring login for old.reddit.com browsing.

Option A: You occasionally encounter power tripping mods on a site where you are free to create your own community and become the mod yourself.

Option B: a power tripping drug-addled Nazi billionaire owns the entire site and can change the site behavior for every user on a whim, with no recourse.

This doesn’t seem like a hard choice to make.