I think this will be a net positive even if they are replaced with worse moderators. Users are more than capable of self-regulating their communities and upvoting quality content.

Moderators are too concerned with weeding out people and bad content as soon as possible and as much as possible. But it's OK to have a bunch of low quality comments and posts, and just let the users decide what gets seen by most of the people.

I'm much more concerned with moderators thinking they can decide to protest on behalf of millions of people, than I am with millions of people seeing content that breaks a subreddits rules.

I don't know if you have much experience managing an online community, but I believe you will discover eventually that everything you claim about self-regulation is false. A small fraction of bad actors can do enough damage to make a community not-self-sustaining.

There's a reason every bar has bouncers.

And then the people you talk to end up talking about movies and video games and you lose interest because you're only living interested in the real world.