That's it. It's the illusion of fairness and it takes away reddit jannies' ability to show off their powermod status, and that's the only incentive they have not to use sockpuppets for every sub they mod.

This is actually another of Reddit's decisions that I'm in agreement with. Subscriber count isn't a very useful number, it largely just measures how old a subreddit is. You can already see how old the subreddit is much more accurately by looking at its founding date.

The user numbers were bogus anyway since Reddit didn't automatically decrement the user number after banning a member. The banned member had to manually unjoin the subreddit. So the membership count was inflated with banned members.