Most of the terrible stuff Reddit did only affected a tech-literate minority, at least knowingly. Most users didn’t use 3rd party apps so they didn’t even understand what the uproar was about, and we should know perfectly well people don’t care about their privacy.

In contrast, this change is likely to affect day-to-day habits of at least some people.

There is also an inherent kind of entitlement that people have. Putting the lack of visibility of privacy on the totem pole of priority, people like free things. When you start to charge them for an objectively worse service, you tend to piss off your user base.