End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.
Value to who? Not to me. I saw subs I liked nosedive because of popularity. I saw the network effect force me to unsubscribe and search elsewhere.
I can even give you an estimate of the number of subscribers required to kill a sub, between 70k and 300k, depending on the theme of the sub. This is when the peanut gallery joins in and the spectators become the showrunners.
But value to the shareholders? Sure! More people, more ad revenues.
Well, define "dead", because in your terms beehaw/lemmy is dead and still everyone wants to be a part of it.
People need to fight this fear of missing out. There are people here who suggest that we should run bots to mirror reddit. That would be a disaster.