The theory being that it will revert to more manual, hands on moderation, rather than automated and more sweeping (eg. instantly banning people for simply posting in an unrelated but disfavored sub).

I have only moderated relatively small subreddits with hundreds of users and even that was an exhausting slog that was only made feasible with third party subreddit tools. if you think it's difficult to maintain moderator consistency now, just wait until subreddits are forced to bring on hundreds of moderators to handle the workload.

Reddit admin and users have no idea how much free labour they are benefitting from and how much subreddit quality will decline with this move.

Even things like porn subreddits will instantly be hit. There are bots that evaluate every submission and compare them against illegal content to instantly remove those posts. Without those bots, subreddits will get closed as they lose control over submitted content and bring the ire of admin and public media.

That makes sense.

Although, it goes against the dismissive post to which I was replying, that said Reddit will provide all the missing functionality without a problem.

Apologies, I likely clicked the wrong comment to reply. I agree with you, it's impossible for Reddit to provide that missing functionality. The moderation teams on some popular subreddits are almost the size of the entire paid Reddit admin staff. There is simply no way Reddit can take over the free moderation duties currently undertaken by volunteers.