Think this case in particular is pretty interesting. Former default subreddit and one of the largest on the site (Top 20 at least).
I think /r/videos is where we’ll see how things actually play out with the reddit admins. I’m guessing at some point the admins will step in and replace the mods.
See this is the problem with reddit. On a site like Twitter, pissing off your power users doesn’t matter much. If anything you lighten the server load some if they leave. You have plenty of users to replace them.
On reddit, pissing off the power users means losing the unpaid volunteers keeping your site running. Sure, reddit can just reopen the sub, and probably will. But who’s going to moderate it? A sub that big needs a serious mod team. What happens if several other large subs follow them? How is reddit planning to staff all these subs? Will whoever they grab know what they’re doing? If enough mod teams resigned in one go reddit would have no way to keep the site working. Even if they find new volunteers it doesn’t mean they’ll know how to moderate a huge community.