I believe it was the opposite, people got outraged because they got the exact meaning of the joke.
People were expressing loud and clear their grievances and one admin response was in the lines of "we know about it, let's do nothing and watch the drama unfold, it will die down".
That's a fair point, but if you read the article, it reads like a post-mortem: "this is what happened, this is why it sucked, life goes on, let's try to not do this again."
Maybe competing websites (Voat in particular) got a bump because of what happened, but at the end of the day redditors aren't an activist crowd (or rather, they are a slacktivist crowd.) I doubt this will have any big consequences.
People were expressing loud and clear their grievances and one admin response was in the lines of "we know about it, let's do nothing and watch the drama unfold, it will die down".