You also aren’t reliant on someone else running an instance that could go down at any time, either permanently or an outage.

You have to worry about it yourself though.

I should say that Reddit without RES would probably be much closer to what I’m seeing on Lemmy now.

Why? It’s a less mature platform with less features and not enough content. I get the idea of it being attractive but it’s like Mastadon without the content you’ve got an uphill climb.