You couldn’t remove a mod for anything except breaking TOS or for being inactive.

Reddits definition of inactive has seemingly changed to benefit them as well.

A sub I was in fought for 2 years to get rid of our derelict landlord and every time, reddit would alert him and he'd show up nuke any dissent and then vanish again after having been missing and unresponsive for months. The ONLY moderation the guy did was to remove anyone that tried to direct people to a sub that had actual moderators and only after one of us made a request to take the sub that he abandoned, and reddit did not care.

Now suddenly having your sub private is enough and mods who were active the day before spez got angry about it are removed because they'd been away for a couple weeks prior. Horse crap.