I paid for Reddit gold back in the day, I really enjoyed the ability to selectively gift gold to comments.
When they replaced gold with coins I ended up unsubscribing. The coins felt like they devalued what gold actually was.
I think it's fair that they want to revisit the feature, but shutting off a revenue stream a month after they made such a big deal about charging for API access, it feels to me like they are lacking common direction and priorities within the company...
They're doing it in preparation for their new model where they pay content creators. If that doesn't P.O. the rest of the remaining mods who work free I don't know what will.