The bad publicity hurts it a lot though. It's not something tangible that people are going to see results in for a long, long time. It's going to be more gradual than immediate.
Also Reddit will retain a huge majority of people, but the quality of it's communities will decline over time. People will find less of a reason to go there, and companies paying for data scraping will pay less as it will become much less efficient to use it.
Think more like Facebook. Still a huge mega company that has a iron grip in the social media sphere... but largely only gets used by tech illiterate older people. It's often quoted as the "place memes go to die" and "a place for grandma" or boomers in general. Reddit, and Twitter will essentially become similarly comparable.
Anyone saying otherwise, is goofy. Either trying to see an immediate result... or those trying to argue there will be no results.
I haven't deleted mine, but I no longer visit the site. I mostly nuked the content on my account a few years ago. Sure there's some stuff now, but it's nothing important. I'm just leaving it there for convenience.
That said I'm mostly moving off of corporate owned media. I put links to my new stuff on my accounts on those sites.