And I'm pointing out how this "most plausible scenario" ends in ruin for Reddit. If Reddit's most popular subs are being run by people whose literally only qualification for the role is that they are power hungry, what kind of subreddit will those end up being? The mods won't be doing anything to cultivate the quality of the place, they likely won't even know what "quality" is. They'll just come up with a bunch of rules to enforce, throwing their weight around pointlessly and alienating anyone who sticks around long enough to interact with them. They probably won't even be good "janitor" moderators because proper janitoring is a lot of hard work that doesn't necessarily result in you receiving the sort of adulation that a power-hungry person would actually crave. Why spend hours dealing with meaningless spam that only bots will see you blocking when you get more of a thrill from bossing around people who slipped up on some technicality or rule that you implemented primarily so that people would slip up on them?
And if the admins try ordering you to do the spam-patrol grunt work with the threat of kicking you out, well, you don't actually care. They're not paying you and you have no interest in the community itself. Rinse and repeat.
TipRing