I think it lasted for a couple of weeks.
It lasted exactly two weeks. No demands were met. No further action was taken.
How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Following the original “protest” some subs remained dark to continue the boycott. These communities were either banned or had their moderators replaced with more compliant ones. Some subs saw their moderators banned for dissent, then the entire sub was banned for being unmoderted. After that, dissenting users were systematically banned, either explicitly for dissenting, or implicitly for various BS reasons. Now, Reddit is mostly AI bots with a handful of real people who either drink the kool-aid or have learned that the nail who sticks out gets the hammer.
Don Dickle comes to mind. Guy treats this place like his personal search engine. If you read his bio, it says multiple people share the account.