If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit.
I think people are recreating their niche communities here but they are floundering since the user base is still pretty small. Maybe it’s best to post to the “big” communities until the time is right to move to smaller, targeted communities?
You could be right, there’s a few here that are still pretty dead, I have tried to inject a bit of life into a few of my favourites but the patients are still unresponsive. That said, its good to have readymade replacements already up and running if/when the clowns running reddit make another catastrophically bad decision that pisses off even more of their userbase.
What does need to happen is a cleaning up of all the duplicates - there are two Swimming comunities and two Idiotsincars for instance. The Android community mods did the right and honourable thing by merging with another Android community on a tech focused instance, others should be encourage to do the same