I mean, Lemmy is designed to be a replacement for Reddit, not forums. It should comes as no surprise that it encapsulates and continues the norms Reddit popularized.

You may want to expand on your last paragraph. Not only does that sound like where most of your opinion is, but I cannot really tell what that main opinion is.

What tropes did Reddit try to own? IMO, Spez et. al. are not intelligent enough to target, “owning common tropes”. I think they just made a twist on forums and it stuck.