Maybe, I think it seems like that. I felt similar until I had some posts moderated away or banned, which made me realize there is probably a lot more of those going on then I realized. There isn't a big notification when things get removed. There is also trying to post and dealing with automoderator. There's subreddits I don't read or participate in anymore becasue of how annoying it is to get a post through.
I get their necessary, at least for now, because of spam. But like I'm said I think there's a better middle ground and we can rely on the community users more.
You cannot, in fact, rely on the community users more. It does not scale.
You'll see situations where most people are nominally opposed to low-effort memes while everyone upvotes the low-effort memes, and then people complain that there are too many low-effort memes cluttering the front page and now the sub is trash and they're leaving.
edit: though honestly I don't think volunteer mods scale well either. A tiny niche sub can get by with just a couple mods just fine, but when they get 100x as popular, can they then have 200 mods? Or have 2000 mods for the most popular subs? No, there's just no way to coordinate that many volunteers sensibly, not in an environment like Reddit.
I get their necessary, at least for now, because of spam. But like I'm said I think there's a better middle ground and we can rely on the community users more.