It's not the admins (read: reddit employees) making those changes, tho. The mods are the ones who're making those changes and decisions, and they are doing that in large part as a response to a shift in the userbase that has lead to a lot more bitter fights over anything related to social justice issues. The actual changes coming from the admin team have been almost unnoticeable, and even the banning of FPH was reasonably in line with their banning of other subs like /gameoftrolls and /niggers.
Which highlights the whole problem of the land grab that subreddits are, and why hubski is just fundamentally a better way for a community. Monetizing it is going to be much harder but honestly, there are ways that don't involve turning the community into a product.
It's a different way, and better isn't a useful term unless you define your metrics for what constitutes better/worse. Users here are far more responsible for managing their own curation, and topic-specific communities will be much more weakly defined and amorphous. Significant growth of this site will be a real stress test for how this style of social media will work at scale. One of the great features of reddit is the ability to create small, closeknit, well-defined, single topic communities that can be joined with little hassle by new members.