People refusing to use their app etc. are likely a minority. Most people are completely used to being bullied into submission by tech companies, and will happily follow along.
I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.
Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.
I'm personally not confident if the signal to noise ratio took a turn for the worse (re: spam and porn posts), the site would be as a profitable/popular anymore
What I'm curious about is why didn't (and maybe they did as I'm not particularly well read in this situation) reddit just buy the apollo app for like $1M/$5M/etc. and then just modify it so it injects whatever tracking they want instead of creating this giant far more costly shitstorm?
Further, maybe the 50k paid users but perhaps there were many unpaid users using it less intensely?
I’m not downloading the app. I am just not doing it. Period.