Definitely. A lot of Reddit mods, or the “landed gentry”, are mods because they likely made the sun because they had a niche interest they were carving out a forum for.
In the same groups a found a lot of the mods were people who participated in the community a lot. And then the others that participated were the first to get added to the mod list.
Most of the time on most of the subreddits that aren’t defaults and don’t regularly hit the front page the mods are just users who love that particular subject, idea, whatever.