Stop trying to trap people inside “the app”. If “the app” is designed to keep people inside and not visit other sites, that's a reader-hostile pattern and a publisher-hostile pattern.
The founding model of using Reddit is “the front page of the internet”. That requires that the rest of the internet is still there, not that the rest of the internet gets sucked into Reddit.
No, you've got it: Revenue increases, short term, when personnel costs are cut, through layoffs and hiring freezes.
The story told (“workers must return to the office to sit on teleconference all day” prompting more of them to quit, or “your job can be done by robots”, or whatever) only needs to make enough sense that the stock holders are satisfied the executives have a sane explanation for sudden loss of workers. Otherwise it might look like the executives are panicking!