Knowing those mods and having been invited (and declining to participate) in the subreddit from the year before, they are 25% serious, 75% kidding.

There does exist a Slack chat room where they bitch and moan to the admins about which subs should get shut down, and quickly point out when new ones are created (they stalk user profiles to see signs of new subs being created).

The 75% kidding is re-aligning where those subreddits were on the chart, and adding ones that get banned, making it look like they actually got them banned.

So they're happy to see them gone, do have minor influence, but the majority of the time they are just ret-conning the list.

I was a mod at DeuxRAMA before it was banned, and a mod at YiffInHell before the admins gave it back to actual furries.