Any revenue stream for reddit starts with real human eyeballs, and not bots. Bots can post and inflate activity numbers (which is good for ads), but they're not going to buy gold.

So you get rid of gold so that it doesn't look like that revenue stream is drying up, especially if you need to fake that selling ads to real people is going really great.

If you had just pissed off a massive portion of your users and they went to lemmy and elsewhere, but you knew they'd be pissed off and you were already ready to replace them by catching fewer bots, then you have to do this to keep up the sham.

Eventually all shams get caught, but you really only have to survive to your IPO this fall. VC money and CEO are all on board with this sham.