Yeah, I do honestly think that that would be the only way this works. If the majority of mods were just like "yup, we'll shut it down and leave", forcing reddit to replace _large_ swaths of moderation, things could get ugly for them. As it is, as far as I have seen, very few subs are committing to being permanently closed, and Reddit will only boot mods from a _very_ small number of subs over a 2 day closure, so they don't have to find much replacement talent.

Right now, admins will probably replace a few dozens of mods, and then the rest of the site will be back in 2 days, and nothing will change.

It seems unlikely that they'll have to make it work for thousands of subs, and quite frankly if they do then they'll likely have a new cooperative group of powermods that they can delegate most of the work to.

I think the real thing that Reddit has to worry about is that upset activists could directly start spamming the site in order to justify their warnings about what will happen without mods. "Nice subreddits you have here, would hate to see anything happen to them if you don't accede to our demands."