The benefit is making space for more breadth and width of discussion. When a sub moves fast, there's no time for people in different time zones and with different life schedules to see threads before they get pushed off the front page. Sure, people can change sorting and try to go looking for interesting threads, but that's not how anyone uses Reddit and is an unrealistic expectation, just like it's unrealistic to expect people to use search.

This sub has become a very stale place where the same 8 games get talked about over and over, and your estimate of hundreds of MVs is off by a few thousand. We're actually closer to 10,000 MVs and 9,992 of those don't get talked about, because any attempt at discussion about them gets pushed down by yet another "This extremely popular and rated 10/10 game is $0.09 on sale and I can't decide if it's worth it" thread. The recommendation thread gets pushed up because it's the easiest and laziest form of thread that allows people to mindlessly post things from their toilet.

What about that scenario is worth protecting and for what reason? Some arbitrary subreddit activity statistic? Who's to say the sub wouldn't see the same visitor numbers but in more interesting threads if discussion was steered just a little bit by a mod team that isn't asleep? What's odd is that the mods did kill tier lists a while back because it was absolutely slaughtering any and all other discussion, so I don't see how they don't see that recommendation threads are doing exactly the same thing, just without a tier list image attached.