Overall it’s a tough situation to be in. I feel a combination of account restrictions would be a way to mitigate the majority of these low quality troll accounts who get verified and then immediately start spamming.

Having images uploads tied behind user metrics such as interactions, time since creation, upvote / downvote count etc I feel would be a good indicator of a “real” user. You’ll always have bad actors coming in causing issues, but at least making new users jump through hoops will make this process slower.

Closing registrations temporarily to add in extra mod features is fine, but leaving it closed and switching to an invite only system feels like it’s going to slow adoption (unless in the request an invite form it’s explicit that the request will be processed quickly, people will just move on otherwise)