https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759180/reddit-protest-p...
A lot of subs will probably switch to bare minimum policing, which is to say only site wide rules which basically turns every sub into a free for all like /r/worldpolitics.
You think it's easy to replace 4 to 10 moderators across 8000 subreddits? I sure you, it most definitely is not.
That being said, treating mods as some kind of tenured position has lead to plenty of abuse as well. Altogether it's going to be a thin line for everyone involved to tread in order to keep these communities intact through all of this.
Right now the mods are the only source of continuity within a community. Let people vote and you get mod vote brigades, and a realistic chance that every major sub on the site becomes /r/politics, regardless of what letters follow the /r/ in the URL, because everyone will vote out anyone who tries to prevent it.
The other thing too is that the entire purpose of a mod is basically to make enemies. The angry people, the unpleasant people, the very people you want them to tone down or ban are also the ones who will vote with maximum vigor. And bot nets, slander campaigns, personal threats, these are the people who have no lines. As a moderator myself, who does it for my own reasons, if I had to "defend" my moderation powers against a community slander campaign I wouldn't so much as lift a finger. I may well just make the ringleader a mod on my way out. I have no motivation to fight that fight. And if that's kind of what you want to hear from your moderator, rather than having a moderator who actually will engage in a community reputational deathmatch to keep their powers, you probably shouldn't encourage a structure that will even further reify needing to spend a ton of energy in politics just to keep their janitorial position.
I think Reddit could survive simply removing the mods & replacing them. I won't guarantee thriving, and it may not economically survive, but some number of users would still keep going. I think making it so communities can vote out mods (and probably by a simple majority vote of those who bother to vote, as is the American Way) actually would kill them, because of the second- and higher order effects of that change. The end result of the Mod Wars of 2023 would be the metaphorical equivalent of the Sahara Desert I referred to in an earlier post [1]. The only people who would persist in such an environment are exactly the ones that you want moderators to remove.