I think this is the death knoll for the protest unfortunately. Shitposting hurts the user experience, but it doesn't really hurt reddit. In a week or two the casual users will revolt against the protests and the mods will feel like they have lost popular support and cave.
Hopefully enough people have fully left the platform to cause reddit some pain. But honestly I think reddit would rather have a smaller easier to manipulate user base of new users rather than keeping all the oldest and most cynical users.