It's mostly people who keep getting banned or keep making new accounts for some reason that fall into this. Or bots posting to generate tons of link karma but never posted comments and never got comment karma. It's to prevent those who get banned or bots from being able to flood a sub.
/r/nfl was notorious for deleting posts from unknown users when new broke to repost it from a mod's account. Had nothing to do with ban evasion or bots, just leveraging the control they had to make sure they had all the biggest posts.
I think I had things removed once or twice in the eight years I was on Reddit. I'm not sure why this sentiment keeps cropping up because I've never had this experience. Do people just not read the sidebar before posting things in random subreddits? That's the only way I could see this happening with such frequency.
I would read sidebars most of the time but sometimes I didn't understand the way the mods intended the rules to be understood. For example I posted a link to an on-topic podcast or blog post. But it gets taken down for being "self promotion" even though there is no reason to believe (or even allegation) that I had anything to do with the production. But since the mods have no way of telling apart sock puppets from legitimate third parties, they have banned all blogs and podcasts to be fair. Silly me I thought "self promotion" meant you were "promoting" your "self". But actually they just don't accept blogs, podcasts, youtubes etc.
Other times there are banned domains. Like one time I made a self post in a tech forum that mentioned an item on aliexpress. But aliexpress is banned because there was so much spam. Another time I linked to an image from pinterest in a hobby sub. Both taken down by automod.
Eventually you learn stuff like this although it requires a mod to take the time to tell you. It's annoying how the posts are silently hidden without notification or explanation. I got in the habit of checking posts with no/low comments in incognito. That's how you learn it was taken down but you then have to message the mods to learn why.
The subreddit should have a list of rules for you to read and follow to prevent this sort of annoying retry situation. Perhaps read them if you want to participate in the community.
showerthoughts had a super strict automod that would shoot down damn near anything mildly original. And people wondered why half of the sub was top/all reposts
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