I think it's more likely that it's an attempt to steer the conversation away from the usual reaction (which was discussed to death two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208958).
The reality is people including on Reddit itself (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ilxihw/reddit_g...) have a lot of legit complaints about how the website now loads on mobile and is deliberately annoying to force people to download their app.
