People need to remember that you don't own a subreddit, reddit owns your subreddit, they're just letting you moderate it for them.

Subreddits are discussion forums, they aren't business ventures. Obviously the very big ones run into some gray area, but the overwhelmingly common situation is that moderators "put effort into the task" of creating a subreddit so they can simply have a nice place to discuss things and not "to reap benefit".

Trying to monetize a subreddit isn't really the purpose of the site, and if you want to do that there are other tools available.

Seems no different than Bogleheads shilling index funds in the 00’s

From what little I know the person responsible for growing the WSB community was the banned admin 'zjz' who was quoted.

Yes. That's the business model of Reddit.

They host the website and have the user base.

And moderators create subreddits which they control.

The web comic xkcd's subreddit had a holocaust denier as the top mod. In 2014.

Reddit didn't step in even though the comic's creator didn't like it. And other mods and the community asked for it.

They were only removed once they were inactive for two months.

Summary I found: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/reddit-xkcd-moderator-socce...

Reddit "steps" if and only if there is a marketing disadvantge or possibilties of judicial actions.

Reddit never had any problems hosting white supremacists, pedophiles, psychopaths and criminals as long as news networks or authorities didn't get involved.

User count is more important than morality, ethics, humanity or moderation. Reddit also tends to casually lie about this. The creepy smiling Smoo says it all.