I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they're doing this now because they've run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won't be noticed in a month.

Well, two things about that. In their interviews, Huffman says this decision making is based on Elon Musk at Twitter. I think this implies that Huffman is not basing this on numbers but on ideology and an example set by Musk. It's simply "If I'm a rich tech bro and a richer tech bro does x, I can become a richer tech bro by copying them!"

Secondly, they can crunch the numbers, it doesn't mean they are right, or that they are not subject to change in unexpected ways. Digg V4 was also a calculated decision, but they greviously miscalculated.

I doubt anyone on the Reddit payroll tells spez the unvarnished truth right now. Musk's employees infamously curate their interactions with him. I read somewhere about one (I want to say working in info-sec for Tesla) who kept an extra monitor with a Matrix style scroll of bullshit because it matched Musk's perception of what a busy person in that field should have up.