Not only did discussion used to drive that site, but thriving niche communities. I hired a young-ish (~25) webdev recently and he asked where I heard about a certain topic. I told him reddit and he was genuinely confused. I sent him links to r/webdev, r/selfhosted, r/sysadmin, r/datahoarder, and a handful of other recommendations. His mind was blown that reddit not only had those communities, but how deep the content was.
My point is, reddit has really leaned into the lowest common denominator audience to chase growth and has completely abandoned its nerd roots (most evidently by its API policy changes).
They aren’t fully auth-gating the comments yet. You can view the first 5-8 top-level comments and 2-3 comments deep on each parent. Overall, I find myself spending probably 1/5 of the time on a thread that I used to.