I had a somewhat comparable thing happen. A sub blew up in a modgate. The mod claimed the user base was behaving like children and put us in a timeout (they locked the sub for a while). Then they took away any and all mechanisms for holding the mods accountable. So similar to spez' approach in spirit.

The users who were upset eventually formed their own sub reddit, the original sub blocked the hell out of users and mentions of the new sub. Eventually the mods had an internal issue and ... Came to the new sub to complain about other mods. After a while some newer mods from original sub kept coming over promising every rything and anything was in the works to improve things.

Initial reaction was distrusting, cautious, somewhat constructive and mostly friendly to the newer mods and rather unfriendly to the mods who tried to bring their internal drama to our new space. Eventually newer mods promises went nowhere and then the user base became A LOT more jaded towards newer mods.

In this example people had been shadow banned and abused in modmail, blocked without reason and so on. So the mods had personally and intentionally hurt many users. For reddit the scale is bigger and the pain for most of us isn't that personal. So I'd hope the reception would be slightly warmer.