One of the points of the protest was to drive down engagement to the reddit website entirely. You searched for a problem, found that reddit no longer has the answers, and posted about your frustrations on lemmy, a direct competitor to reddit, driving up engagement on lemmy instead.

I’m pretty sure the protest is working just as intended, even after it “ended”.

I’m really sorry about your problem though. I wish I had the expertise to help, but I don’t.