I doubt the likes of Google and Microsoft care in the slightest about the API.
Both already run search engines that index all of Reddit. They don't need any API. And Reddit can't block their crawler if it wants to remain relevant.
And OpenAI is a company with $10B investment and 375 employees. I'm sure they can figure out web scraping.
Third party apps need to do a lot of API calls, every time that the user sees content, upvote content, comment content. If you're just retrieving it though? We can simplify it to one API call = one comment.
With that in mind, $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls is damn cheap. It means just $2,400 for 10M comments. It's pocket money, and likely cheaper than to hire a codemonkey to sort web-crawled stuff.
Both already run search engines that index all of Reddit. They don't need any API. And Reddit can't block their crawler if it wants to remain relevant.
And OpenAI is a company with $10B investment and 375 employees. I'm sure they can figure out web scraping.