Yes but on other sites where people have historically posted the shortened direct sub urls that used to go to old.reddit will now forward to new reddit or be broken according to the comments of the OP post. That’s the key difference here. Posts people made many years ago will now go to new reddit, which is why I suspect specifically attempting to manipulate user / site stats because even if their api prevents search engines from using it properly, there’s a wealth of already indexed links out there.