Reddit

On the contrary, I think it's a good protest. It shows that for a subreddit to thrive, the support of the moderators is key. They need to have the right tools for the job and be supported by Reddit. Otherwise the content will be shitty and not worth it for the shareholders.

Yeah I think making it so low effort content ruins the sub is good enough without allowing NSFW content. I think generally this is the best way for mods to protest though. Let subs become practically useless when community rules no longer are enforced

That would still take actual content moderation, their point of protest is spez devaluing the mods. They didn't ask people to post nsfw, they just said, post what you want we're going to moderate to the bare minimum and see just how unimportant mod content guidance is. And here they are apparently. In some ways it works better than the sesame street route as it's a fully user driven stream of live content that can change at any time. I've seen people in the sesame subs complaining about the enforced John Oliver posts and targeting the mods, even though there was a vote, and going to make new subs. There will still be those people but it's harder to blame the mods with this route, imo.

is just the excuse the admins will use to remove all the mods and replace them.

Not much of a concern, Reddit is going to remove mods anyway. Spez has made it clear that Reddit is going to keep changing around rules to be able to justify removing mods. At some point they'll start allowing random Reddit accounts to use /r/RedditRequest to request "unmoderated" subs aka any sub where the moderators don't seem to be moderating as expected. And/or Reddit will close those subs for being "unmoderated", or they'll temporarily place their own Reddit staff to moderate such subs if the sub is too big to close outright.