Most other services are passively exploitative like you’re describing. I can at least see an argument for that being a trade-off: using a “free” service in exchange for profiting from your data.

reddit does this too, but on top of that is also actively threatening to ban users for voting. That’s just using the platform as intended.

As you noted, most of these services are hostile in ways that go unnoticed by the userbase. This is markedly more hostile than that, which is I think the point of the comment above. In an internet of services that are shitty toward users, reddit’s a bit extra shitty toward theirs.