I think though that the trade off to not getting paid is that you run your sub however you want. The mod teams set community standards, but rarely are expected you do so democratically. Not all mod teams ruled with an iron fist, but some did. That's the perk when your labor is free.
In my 11+ years of experience, the few times mods made things democratic in subs (prior to reddit going dark this month) were when a new feature of the community cropped up that was divisive but popular, the mod team actually agreed or liked that be feature of the community but didn't want to be viewed as embracing something that was drawing ire from a vocal portion of the community, so the mods opened it to a vote to avoid the controversy of overtly picking sides and let the trolls and brigades overrun a voting system to codify the new feature into the community. This gave mods enough cover and plausible deniability about their hands being tied and the people have spoken, so who are we to ban all neo-Nazi memes? or whatever the divisive topic was.