The effort is more insidious - and I suspect its from China's investment into Reddit; here is my theory:
---
You can only havea working social credit system and survellience system online if you can collapse everyone down to a single UID of whatever (in this case usernmaes)
So if you have multiple accounts, and they can corerolate the multi-accounts to a single UID (person)
And you can use billions of bots and computational resources to track to whom a comment bleongs (the human) -- you have all that much more control and leverage over controlling that commentary coming from that human.
---
I think they are ensuring they have laser connection to the previously anon reddit accounts such that they have a sniper rifle on any human that steps out of bounds.