I feel like the admins and their actions were just not that visible back in the day too. Aside from the occasional drama around banning a high-profile sub, the fact that Reddit was run by a company with its own interests didn’t come into play very often. With the admin layer hidden, Reddit the website felt like a sandbox run by the community.
It seemed like there was a backlash against it. At some point you would get downvoted for citing hailcorporate in comments. If I were more conspiratorial-minded, I would think that Reddit started throwing in downvotes at any comments mentioning hailcorporate, because it would hurt Reddit’s image and advertiser-friendliness. But I’ve noticed that, across social media, some folks seem to get really upset when you point out that a post is fake/marketing/staged. So maybe that’s just online culture now…
Tbf, while daily-driving Firefox I do occasionally encounter websites (mostly web apps) that do not work on Firefox. But it’s often a pretty simple fix, like sometimes I can get around it myself just through Dev Tools shenanigans.