If Victoria had done her job with condescension towards mods, if she had been haughty in her communications, arbitrary and non-transparent in her decision making, etc. then you can bet your bottom dollar that she would not have been so valued by the mods and the wider community.
This isn't about making 'difficult decisions' but about how they are made, communicated and implemented.
That is why I added the bee analogy in my previous comment.
I'm one of the "nicer" mods on my subreddit because I'm polite and very careful and careful in how I construct my responses to actions.
But at the end of the day I'm also liked because I'm not the most active mod. The very act of exerting power over another user, especially someone who has never stopped to think about the rules or the site history, results in resentment.
The better your mod team is at being able to implement the rules, the more friction there will be.
People will also come out to complain more than compliment.
This results in distancing from the community, just because of how painful it can be.
Good tools to moderate create more ways to censor people, track them, decide what words are ok and others which are not.
In short, Victoria is far removed from the kind of things which make people hate admins.
Why the past tense? Did people suddenly stop loving Raymond Chen for some reason?
In particular, Victoria had the job of making AMAs happen smoothly, and /r/IAmA is this very weird subreddit, operationally speaking (how many other subreddits have their own mobile app?), that clearly needs a paid staff member. Ellen has the job of being the final say on anything that happens, controversial or otherwise. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that an AMA needs to happen, Victoria does it. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that a subreddit needs to be banned, Ellen does it (or at least takes the blame for it).