Awards were always super jarring when I accidentally ended up on "new reddit". I could never tell who actually liked them. But to just remove the feature, and take coins immediately (that people paid for) away with no alternative is shitty.
I guess management wants to get rid of those nasty ad free benefits.
Hell, most of the people using it were indeed trolls, I actually met many of them and they said that they really used awards to troll heartbreaking, nsfl, or depressing posts by giving them the wholesome, helpfull awards etc. And the other half was basically karma bots. But as much as it was a crap feature, It really did gain reddit server time and revenue