I don't consider the discussions there to be "real" in any meaningful way, thanks to the extensive moderation.
From what I've seen, there typically ends up being a small handful of moderator-enforced narratives that are deemed "acceptable" for a given subreddit, and any commenters deviating from those narratives get banned, or their comments end up as "[removed]" by "[deleted]", or the comments get obscured with the "comment score below threshold" notice.
It's generally some of the most one-sided and blandest discussion around. Given that there's often no meaningful back-and-forth involving differing perspectives of any sort, I'm not even sure if it should be considered "discussion". It's more like regurgitation and repetition.
I've found the situation to be particularly bad on the Canadian locale-specific subreddits, for example, but a enough of the tech-oriented ones I've seen seem to end up like that, too.
Obviously, people do see value in it, or they wouldn't keep saying so! I would happily exclude Reddit links from search results though.
Not exactly always a reliable source of info outside uncontroversial niche topics or places like /r/AskHistorians that actually moderate. And even there I've seen the occasional humdinger.