A scraper would get blocked, API is paid now, and this is bad because it's reddit enforcing their claim that they own the rights to the comments.

Some people were saying that exactly this kind of thing would happen, even before the AI hype, and encouraging everyone to just mass edit their comments to useless strings, then bail from reddit definitely. They were laughed off and called alarmists by the crowd that thought that a protest with a 72 hour deadline would somehow dissuade reddit from being dicks.