It’s possible that the enforcement of a rate limit isn’t because of AI scraping, but rather because they failed to migrate before the June 30th deadline.
Most of my favorite smaller communities on Reddit (50-500k members) are gone permanently. A couple of them were basically forums run by a niche YouTuber with a couple of helper mods, to talk about topics related to their channel. Those people didn’t want to deal with trying to use Reddit anymore, so they just closed down. It’s basically impossible to bring a community like that back, when the person it exists around is gone.
I don’t see Reddit stepping in for all of those smaller communities, so they’re just gone entirely. And that was where most of the value was for me. So yeah, its completely worthless to me at this point to even use Reddit.