There were many subreddits that did not allow participation unless someone had a karma over a certain threshold. For many of them the threshold was pretty low, only meant to stop brand new accounts and trolls, but still.
Additionally, the "people who farmed it" often did so because a reddit account with a high karma score was literally worth money to adspammers and people running bots.
The karma system contributed to what made reddit bad.
They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.
Owners are owners. I can't have too much sympathy if a group of disenfranchised people, who have never had the opportunity to own anything, don't distinguish between hyper capitalists and regular vanilla capitalists. Both are pieces of the system that denies people the value of their labor.
I don't see how that addresses any of what I said. If anything this seems like this would mean the subreddits that blocked people with no karma weren't even doing it to block trolls, just new users.
I didn't care about my karma or any specific persons, I like to get into arguments about stuff and that is how you get downvoted. I just don't like the behaviour a karma system motivated.