Well, no, there is a way to turn back. The shareholders can fire spez and replace him with someone community-friendly. A lot of goodwill has been burned, but that would put out the fire pretty quickly, at least.
If they brought on a new CEO who kept removing mods forcefully and telling blind people to get fucked I don’t think that goodwill would last very long. They would have to give up something to get on everyone’s good side.
Except that it wouldn’t fix the fact that a lot of 3rd party developers are done. Even if Reddit sacked Huffman and rolled back the API changes, the odds of Apollo, RiF, Sync, etc. developers coming back is basically zero after all of this.
And now that they’ve shown their hand with the mods, the odds of getting their good mods back are slim-to-none as well.