Most Android manufacturers are using minimal development teams to get closed source blobs from the CPU+radios OEMs to talk to the OS. Like the article says, Qualcomm stop supporting older generations of their SoCs pretty quickly, and those manufacturers don't invest the resources in custom development, which is the LineageOS approach that Fairphone are taking. There's nothing to promise these updates will be stable and secure though.
Apple has a huge advantage in developing their own processors from start to finish. They're not reliant on anyone else's code, and if they do need to buy in certain components (like Intel modems that they've used before), they've got the size and budget to get pretty much anyone to agree to their terms. It's why Google started the Tensor project, which is rumored to be finally going full Google (ending reliance on Samsung) from 2025/Pixel 9.
As I understand it, the sub being flagged NSFW as a whole means Reddit can't sell ads on it, whereas general subs with NSFW content are considered fine (like AskReddit, where "what's the sexiest sex you've ever sexed?" comes up about twice a week). The subs would need to be flooded with NSFW content that is upvoted above anything SFW for several days and a campaign to highlight this to advertisers to effect change in this way, and I'm sure the admins would yell at them before it got that far and the moderators would crumble again.
Reddit is gambling - so far correctly - that the mods care too much about the subreddits they've spent years building and maintaining to walk away, so they will cave on any protests as soon as the admins get involved.
The only way this will have any real impact is "good" moderators walk away and leave the running of the key ad-friendly subs to newbie inexperienced moderators who will cause serious damage.