totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats

The author asked multiple devs about these things - they all had the same reply: Can't talk about it because NDA.

more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.

That's not the stated objective of the article, which was "Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment."

Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”.

No, it doesn't. You don't call it an "APIcalypse" if you're shilling for Reddit. You don't pull out the most critical quote right at the top if you want to shill for Reddit. ("I don’t believe Reddit’s leadership... cares about developers anymore.") You don't mention Lemmy, or Threads, or Tildes if you're shilling for Reddit.

You admit that you're biased; good, thank you. This article isn't.