API access is still free for moderation and accessibility tools. It’s just third party clients with high API usage that were effectively killed with the pricing change.
disappointing but not unexpected. These are just other "irrelevant power users" to reddit, but for the sake of pretending to care they at least try to keep up the appearance of caring.
And for those who go "the average redditor doesn't care": well, here is another example of "power user" you may not have considered. They certainly are the minority, can't disagree with that.
The problem is that knowing the rug can be yanked out anytime, the desire of people who helped write and maintain the tools to do so has somewhat fallen to zero.