It has nothing to do with reddit and has been going on since the days of frigging usenet.

When someone likes something, they find ways to make an exception. The biggest example being The DRM Wars where EVERYONE was suddenly an active duty military person stationed in an airgap in The Middle East and could not connect to any server to authenticate their game (but had no problem spending hours arguing on message boards). Then Valve say you need to use something called “Steam” to play Half-Life 2 and suddenly everyone is ready to say that Steam is different and not actually DRM even though the model wasn’t that different than how Stardock or even frigging Gamespy were doing stuff.

Everyone hated microtransactions and that is TOTALLY the only reason people were angry at the Star Wars game that came out within a month or two of TLJ. Then Genshin Impact came out and suddenly everyone wanted to make it abundantly clear that that was okay because, yes, it is a gacha game but it is totally a fair one where you can do everything without ever spending any money if you just grind endlessly and use multiple accounts to hoard day limited currencies.

But also? People hated DLC way back when it was something you downloaded from a BBS after mailing the developers a physical check. But when it was a game people liked (Star Crusader with mutha fugging Roman Alexander!!!), it was suddenly okay.

Which is to say: Things have been real shit for coming on 40 years of gaming. And yet, by and large, video games keep getting better (not so much the games industry for the people who make games).