Huffman defended business decisions made by the company to charge third-party apps saying the API wasn’t designed to support these clients.

Then what exactly is it for?

We’re happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and browser extensions

We want to allow developers to build great products powered by Reddit and we recognize our developer community is integral to the success of the Reddit platform.

Seems you were happy with third party apps and products for quite a while.