This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
Gotcha. Makes me wish I had the technical know how to spin up my own instance. Those really are like subreddits then.
To be fair, for most people it is better to just use a another instance. Instance maintenance can take quite some time