Yes, tech-savy and high-literacy people are always the first to move when things go down the drain, I think those are the ones providing the most valuable content, the masses follow but that requires quite some time as you rightfully said.

It could even take longer for reddit masses to realize something has changed, if we consider reddit is full of reposting bots, there’s so much content in there that they could go on for years before content “consumers” realize there’s nothing worthy anymore.