In my experience there's a reddit culture that's quite pervasive. As soon as a subreddit becomes even mildly successful it starts being taken over by low effort content and "downvote to disagree" mindset. Very strict moderation helps but that's a lot of work and few subreddits manage to pull it off.

Then there's the more general problem that Reddit clearly wants to encourage the "facebookization" of the website to drive adoption and ad revenue, and that's how you end up with an almost unusable web interface on mobile if you don't know that i.reddit.com is a thing. The desktop interface at least attempts to show you the posts, but it's still a buggy and laggy mess and you're much better off using old.reddit.com if you know about it.

I just can't be bothered to deal with all of that nonsense.

This works to a certain degree. Often, many of the users contributing in "bad subreddits" also post on "good subreddits". This makes it so that many aspects of "reddit culture" leak into the good subs, for example, the repetitive inside jokes and puns redditors seem to enjoy.