One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.
Instead they wanted to be Facebook Jr, killed all of their interesting and niche aspects, ignored the things users and mods were asking for, and hamfisted general ads in people's faces while adding expensive, unneeded (unwanted!) features like live chat and video hosting.
Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.
No, it's what happens when your investors are VCs who need to 10x on their wins because most of their investments fail. As a result, stable, long-term profitability isn't the goal; big IPOs are, or at least explosive growth. There's no room for a company which is moderately successful when VCs are involved.
I think this is just the way of the world. Usenet -> Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Discord -> ???
Look at the facebook ads platform from the perspective of a small business looking to advertise. It is incredibly effective in how it can target people.
In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for other people's content - if the content producers leave, they don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't have any value even if they did. There's a weak value proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize just how precarious their position is/was.