That 'handful of power users' is behind much of the value creation on that site. Reddit.com was always at their mercy, nothing substantial has changed here.
By power users I meant current moderators. Of course there are other power users that post content for fake points. but they have different motivations. The moderators are far more expendable than the power posters. There is no end of people willing to sacrifice their free time for the status of being a mod of a large sub. The point is to make sure everyone knows that ultimately reddit is in charge and find a collective of mods that are OK with the status quo and know not to rock the boat too much.
It's a symbiosis though. Power posters add content for fake points because there is moderation to keep spam, trash, flamewars (when strictly moderated) at bay so their posts are not lost in the noise.
If a subreddit for a class of products gets flooded with sale spam, low quality content, memes, it will push the users who create higher quality content away. The same for a subreddit about hobbies, if it's not curated to have a good intro FAQ and collection of guides for beginners, and good moderation that is empathetic but can enforce guidelines on questions that constantly pop up, it will push people away because of the noise.
Moderation on reddit is what can control the noise, with a low signal-to-noise ratio the power posters disappear.
