A quarter of all subreddits are still private or restricted (can't post in them). This includes ones like /r/music or /r/programming. Of the 6 30+ million subscriber subreddits, only 3 have returned to normalcy. One is restricted, two others are in john oliver mode. The developers of Minecraft have officially abandoned Reddit as a platform, and advertisers are still pulling out as well.
I still use Reddit, I didn't move here because I was pissed at apps going away (never used them anyway), just wanted to familiarize myself before I'll be forced to move when they inevitably remove old reddit in the future.
There's still communities important to me that either only exist on Reddit or have way too little engagement here. Until they remove old reddit or that changes, I'll stay on reddit. But I'm doing my part by having disabled ads on reddit (I had them enabled before the third party app stuff).
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
This isn't really true, you already had to do this for email. Never heard of that being a barrier of entry.
My parents prefer to opt for local privacy/security focused email providers, while I go with gmail for the feature set and design. But I used to try out a few different ones to figure out which one works best for me. Still use a hotmail email for my Windows account.
I fail to see how this is different to the situation with lemmy/kbin instances.