And Huffman's erratic and hostile response further down the line really sealed the coffin for me.

Yep. Before the AMA, I was defending just doing the two day blackout, rather than, as many were suggesting, blacking out for a longer period. My reasoning was you can always escalate later if a compromise isn't reached. Then Spez opened his mouth, and I (and so many others) realized "this fucker has no interest in compromising" and totally changed my position. Since then, I support any and every form of protest that has been devised, including leaving the site for good (and mostly already) on June 30th.

It's slower, but to use an API requires you to customize your system to use each different sites unique API. It would be a massive development undertaking, for such a small benefit that it would never pay off. For an LLM, you only need to read each page once, you just wait til a post is a month or so old, and essentially all discussion has stopped, and you will get everything you need. So "fast" isn't really a concern at all.

Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it.

But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA's out of business.

Although this is a reasonable solution, it's also reasonable to just let the apps charge a subscription and pay the API fees, which is what the app devs planned. The only issue is that Reddit set their API fees so high that the app devs can't possibly charge enough to make it profitable, certainly not in the time frame they were given.

do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?

This is such a great point that I hadn't even considered. These API changes will have exactly zero effect on LLM's and similar services.