Unfortunately I remember during people moving from Reddit to Lemmy, several people on Mastodon trying to warn others away from doing so due to its lacking moderation tools, and some mainly focusing on the developers, both of which have proven to hold true in various ways.

However, at the time, there really weren't all that many federated alternatives developed enough to go to. If memory serves Kbin was kinda scrambled out to meet the moment, and it's been struggling along since then with its own issues. Aside from those, there were a couple centralized options with Tildes and Postmill being open source, but some were understandably wary of moving to yet another site with a centralized structure (and one of those closed source alternatives people did try out didn't last long).

Now it's kind of interesting as we see another open source centralized option developing (Discuit), Sublinks as you mention in your post, and also Piefed. It's unfortunate that first there seems to have needed to be this rough proof of concept stage before more options appeared, but with any luck they may pave the way to better, more robust sites, and maybe give Lemmy some incentive to improve itself.