I don't think mods are worth that much, not even a single penny per hour when they do retarded petty shit to fuck over subreddits or users for wrongthink.
If I remember mods can ban the fucking owners from their own subreddits which is pretty insane. And these asswipes want more tools and shit because even that's not enough?
Oh well, it is pretty funny to see mods bring up how much value their work is as some sort of bargaining chip... even though they do it for free.
That's what spez meant by calling them landed gentry (although obviously he picked that analogy to specifically piss them off). Subreddits live and die on the whims of mods, and the head mod is ultimately the ruler. There's no recourse for users to oppose fifth column moderation when subreddits get subverted by hostile mod takeover, which has been a common complaint relating to power users. The comparison is that there's no democracy, and the subs are "inherited" by those picked by the top mod.
There's been exceptions in the past where the admins have intervened - but that was
by exception, and usually to do with them shutting down the sub completely rather than users complaining that they didn't like the trannyjanny rules.
They've strongarmed a couple more largish subreddits that were trying to stay dark. The admin approach appears to be firing warning shots by removing mod access to non-compliant top mods and leaving them only with mod mail; this was /r/Unexpected:

When the mods capitulated, the access was restored:

A similar thing happened with /r/Steam:

and apparently a few others like /r/piracy, /r/aww and /r/roblox (lol).

I guess it's kinda smart; it's calling the senior mod's bluff by removing their ability to do anything while still keeping communication lines open so they can panic and freak out about losing their mod powers. Some subreddits are apparently "working with" the admins a bit more after some polls and going into restricted mode;

More than a few redditors are observing that if the complaint is "unpaid labour" then the mods could just accept being removed, since that way they won't have to do that "unpaid labour"... so capitulating because they'd lose their ability to do "unpaid labour" shows how facile that argument is. There's also redditors pointing out that if the mods were so concerned about the "communities" that they "care about", attempting to permanently shut down those communities instead of letting them stagger on isn't really acting in the community's best interest.
Only other point of note is someone in /r/dataisbeautiful did some number crunching to support the protest and accidentally proved the inverse (i.e. the overwhelming majority of reddit users do not use third party apps and do not care);

The comments were a heavy mix of seething about how this must be wrong or the data being unrepresentative alongside people pointing out that this was obvious and their dumb little protest is misguided

About the only people I have sympathy for in this situation are the moderators of /r/blind, who have said they can't run their subreddit any more as none of the default mod tools work with stuff like screenreaders so they can't actually moderate without a third party app. There has been a statement that non-commercial accessibility-oriented apps will be enabled to work through the API, though, and it's clear most of the protestors are really just pissed that their app of choice is being shut and they're being told "no".
Oh, and the protestors are now escalating their demands in a very amusing way;

The
smartest protest tactic I've seen is mods of "wholesome" subreddits setting their subreddits to be tagged as NSFW which isn't advertiser friendly, but that's a very low bar.