They can and have, is the thing.

There's been a few subs knocked out by Reddit giving the mod roles to a greedy powermod. Some "regular" mods are becoming powermods by playing nice with the admins and requesting huge subreddits.

Reddit isn't bluffing when they say "Open up or we will make you." Some teams are reporting less than 24 hours passing between them getting the "admins are knocking on your door" message and the mod team being removed and replaced with a powermod that moderates 100 other subreddits.

It's becoming obvious that you will be opened, like it or not. If mods want to continue to protest, they need to start doing malicious compliance. Subs are looking closely at Reddit's rules and following them to the letter.

Did you know Reddit considers heavy profanity to be NSFW? So you could mark your community as NSFW and use AutoMod to ensure that every post has a curse word in the title. Then since your community is obviously NSFW Reddit can't advertise on it, because ads don't run on NSFW subs.

Other mods are avoiding this approach in fears that Reddit will just ban NSFW entirely. Those are the John Oliver subs. Reddit says "it can't be a surprise what the sub is about" but clearly there's leeway because /r/trees isn't about trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts isn't about marijuana enthusiasts. Hence "only pictures of John Oliver"; if Reddit comes after that then they'd logically be banning /r/trees, /r/anime_titties, /r/196, etc. as well.

Reddit says that it's a democracy (it isn't, admins will always be dictators), and that users should decide the direction of the subreddit. Hence posts asking the users for their input. And of course they're only listening to the demands of the users, after all...

The only way to damage Reddit is from inside Reddit. Make Reddit a miserable experience. They're following all the rules! But it's not a good place to be. Then promote communities elsewhere (also perfectly within the rules) to push people off of Reddit and onto other sites.

And they're just doing exactly what the admins asked them to do, after all.