There have been speculations that they wanted to throttle the API asap because of the AI revolution that has started. Reddit data is absolute GOLD for training large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. OpenAI definitely used data from both Reddit and Twitter in some capacity and for free and are making a ton of money. Tons of startups are now doing the same, training or fine tuning LLMs and for that data scraping is again required. Like Elon keeps complaining about increase in scraping attempts and doing idiotic things to handle that, Huffman just followed in his shoes.

I strongly believe they are just inept. They didn’t understand what value third party apps actually brought. None of the decision makers actually mod anywhere so they probably aren’t aware that reddits official tools are lacking.