its likely actually what pushed to force logins now. banned a large portion of the user base, and that base is only lurking now. with that loss of datamining for google/AI, im guessing whatever scraped currently on reddit is mostly AI generated posts/comments, and reddit desperate to bring back actual users into the fold so they started and will force logins , so that user content can be sold to google again. conveniently google forced limiting accounts per device a few months ago.