Strong moderation would mean that moderation is not optional, always present and always consistent.

Having a toxic community that internally declines to moderate is not strong moderation.

"Tools to allow for" is a hell of a phrase. Yes, moderation is possible on reddit but the idea that the tooling for such is in any way "good" is in error. It's enough to make moderation possible with sufficient application of effort. The fact that it's so rare is a strong indication of how useful those tools are.

Reddit tries to be just a platform, but it fails in two ways:

1) Namespace of subreddits. The subreddit which snags the most obvious name for a topic has a much better chance of becoming canonical for that topic that competitors with worse names.

2) Cross-subreddit identity and supporting tooling. For example, i can easily search for all recent posts made by a particular user, but i can't easily search for all posts made by a particular user within one specific subreddit. This sort of thing promotes "cultural leakage" across reddits and makes people think of all of Reddit as one community with one culture.

Related: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 which summarizes a study that finds cultural leakage across subreddits.