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As someone who joined Reddit nearly 15 years ago, I can tell you it's been that way basically forever. The new people by and large never care about the changes that make the site worse. They never have. I'm sure there were even changes in the few years of its existence before I found it that I didn't care about when I got there.
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Reddit admins are Reddit employees.
Reddit moderators are (generally) not Reddit employees.
Regular users create the subreddits, but they all belong to Reddit.
I'm pretty sure the admins have installed mods before on subreddits where they didn't like the mod team. I think I remember people talking about it at one point, but I can't remember specifics, so I'm not entirely sure. (They do it for abandoned subs all the time, but that's different.)
I know over a decade ago when the IAmA subreddit creator was going to shut that subreddit down one of the admins said they'd take the subreddit over and put new mods in if he didn't change his mind. But at the time the admins weren't throwing their weight around like they would eventually, so it wasn't a consensus thing, just one admin talking.
That info from the petition saying awkwardtheturtle is another user is something that went around for a while, but it wasn't true (unless there's been a turn in that story).
awkwardtheturtle posted a selfie in the "centuryclub" subreddit (which only allowed people with over 100k link or comment karma in), and the person in the selfie definitely wasn't the person people suspected awkwardtheturtle was.
The "proof" so many pointed to (including the petition) was a Vox article which was just repeating stuff from a Daily Beast article. The Daily Beast article never said the two were the same person, but the Vox article assumed they were. Probably because the head mod on a lot of subreddits that other person mods is/was awkwardtheturtle.
Regarding strike through text formatting, it's markdown, so you just type two tildes on each side of the text to strike through like this: ~~[insert text]~~, and you get [insert text].
Here's CommonMark's quick reference for some other basics: https://commonmark.org/help/
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It was there before this, but people just didn't know/have a reason to look. And The New York Post is shit.
Of course, it takes nothing to actually figure out it was there well before this since it was there in 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20200616013438/https://www.oceangate.com/about/employment.html
Here's the capture of the posting itself from 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20200803114408/https://oceangate.com/about/career-opportunities/submersible-pilot.html
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