Thing is, he complained from the start of the protest that all these AI companies had trained their products on reddit's data, and that not only had those companies not paid reddit for it, but that reddit had actively ended up paying for all the bandwidth and everything to transfer that data multiple times to multiple companies. He knew from the start who was really sucking up all the API bandwidth. He could've gone after the corporations and worked with the app developers, given them time to adjust.
But he didn't. He didn't because he panicked when he realized how he had let reddit foot the bill for massive corporations, because he's always been butthurt that no one likes reddit's shitty app and he wanted to force them to move over, because he's too fragile in his masculinity to admit he's made a mistake and change course, yet he's too much of a pussy* to actually stand up to the corporations that screwed reddit over.
He's a shitty person and a worse CEO.
* term used deliberately, because he thinks of himself as this big alpha male "in charge" type but he's really really really not.