If the company decided to make the UI not friendly, they will likely continue to make user hostile decisions in the name of maximising growth and profits.
In this case using addons seems like playing catch up with low chance of a long term win.
On mobile and non-mobile, I use Firefox' Redirector addon to redirect all reddit links to https://ns.reddit.com/* which might be the same as old.reddit.com
They could but seeing how good Reddit's UI is, how good do you think their log scraping is? And do they have the budget for keeping all access logs of anonymous users so they can try to line up all the ChainLinkFence enthusiasts with the people who also frequent r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts and r/WhiteMenGoneWild.