Your take on Reddit's API changes genuinely suck since it was a complete 180 in policy with no middle ground and tons of disrespect from Reddit's higher-ups.
That being said, I agree with your principles. Companies and people make decisions based on the cards they're dealt with. Oftentimes, those cards are dealt by other people with their own deck of cards. Somewhere down this chain, you can find a company or person who purposefully dealt a bad hand to the next guy in the chain out of greed, spite, or even incompetence. You really can't get mad over the last guy in the chain because they can't change the decision made by someone 10 layers before them.