In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
There’s always the nuclearoption: ban everyone, remove everything on the way out the door. I’m sure reddit admins can reverse it, they probably store everything in the database to sell later, but at least if they try to pull that stunt replacing mods they can be in for a huge pain in the ass.