Many uploads on reddit are also repeated re-uploads of compressed and then recompressed ad nauseum videos and stolen content, so I wouldn't be surprised if a fairly significant amount of the uploads started at 360p or less, downloaded from a phone.

> I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain bitrate

You are not the target demographic; the target are mostly on phones, where rapid start and 360p is not a huge deal. You don't get 1080p or 720p from snapchat or instagram. In super blunt terms reddit would rather not want you, they'd much rather have someone with the app downloaded, all tracking on, with push notifications on and the impossibility of ad blocking.

In your example, the video thumbnail implies that this is a recording OF a recording - this is someone that has already uploaded a compressed version to Twitter, where it has been further compressed, and then recorded and cropped on presumably a phone screen, then uploaded to reddit.

If I google the text, the first reddit results are all natively in 240p uploaded original.