We also believe that, generally, the community have been indicating that, by and large, they aren't interested in this content.

How can that be true? Reddit is vote-based. So if people weren't interested, they wouldn't vote it up and it wouldn't appear on the front page. Hacker News has no rule banning posts about Barbie and yet, amazingly, Barbie rarely makes it to the front page, because that's how upvotes work.

People clearly are interested enough to vote LLM related posts up, but a bunch of mods who don't like AI are upset enough to want to dictate what others can find interesting. Which is not unusual for Reddit.

Unlike Hacker News, Reddit's new Best algorithm often surfaces newly posted post (which is a good idea that help mitigate the cold start problem), but that means people who are subscribed to /r/programming will see posts about LLMs and typically downvote them.

From the user responses to the linked ban, said ban was a positive decision for that community.