I'm not sure what people expected to happen. The protests did what they needed to do: they seeded the threadiverse with enough users for a general feed.
Reddit is not going to advertise its internal struggles. We've already seen they can't follow through with their threat to replace moderators when they shutdown "TIHI". Last I checked 3/6 subreddits with 30+ million subs were in some kind of locked or troll state. Another sub mentioned they've had to turn off comments because they dont have the tools to address the 200k+ submissions of backlogged flagged content.