People are only using the 3rd party app line because it's the most relatable argument. It's much more than that. A ton of moderation tools and useful bots are going dark tomorrow thanks to the API policy change. Even if we all go back to Reddit, there's no bringing back those tools. Reddit communities are going to slowly go to shit as spammers all realize that moderators aren't as effective as they used to be. This was going to happen regardless of how the protests turned out. There's no scenario where things get better for Reddit.
You're still stuck when it comes to anti-cheat in multiplayer games. Some do allow it to work on Linux, but a significant number don't. Hopefully the tides slowly start to change thanks to the Steam Deck.
At least when it comes to Git I'm not too concerned. What could MS possibly do to you? Maybe vendor lock in via the issue tracker? They aren't using it and it's not exactly that hard to migrate off of it in the first place.
The question everyone was really asking was if will they will be able to make these quality of life changes before the Reddit API changes come into effect. The answer seems to be "no" unfortunately. It's a huge missed opportunity that may never come again.
They will be fine. But the extension itself is on its last legs. Reddit is slowly breaking old reddit by making features or markdown new reddit only. The team also seems to be down to 2 people and the project is in maintenance mode.
Meanwhile all of the repost bots can post and comment on each other’s threads keeping the Reddit server humming away.
How are they going to do that when the API changes hit? The API changes affect all third party interactions with Reddit unless you scrape their HTML or do some type of browser automation. I'm going to assume that 99% of developers are using the REST API since there was no reason to do otherwise. That means mobile apps, bots, third party tools and probably even some browser extensions are all going to go dark.