Reddit never intended for anyone to pay for API access, that's why the costs were so high. The intent all along was to kill all third party apps through unreasonable pricing of API access so they could funnel users to the official app and inundate them with extremely intrusive ads.

If they had presented the ridiculously high cost of API access to users it would have been more overtly user hostile. By targeting the app developers the surface area of who they were directly screwing was smaller (though they are of course actually screwing all the users of those apps anyway).

This also explains why reddit made all sorts of illogical arguments to make the app developers seem like the bad guys, to try to deflect blame away from them and to the app developers.

They were just super incompetent at doing that effectively, so it was incredibly transparent.