It’s precisely what everyone said would happen.

I don’t disagree with your general point, but I remember that there were many people (on reddit, but also on lemmy) who said there would be lots of power-hungry redditors just waiting to take over and that the admins would thus have no trouble at all finding replacements.

Emmerich is also just an old-fashioned German name. I would assume that the name Amerigo is derived from the name Emmerich, not the town Emmerich.