Let me be crystal clear here:  If pending changes are removed by any admin from any article, that admin is responsible for replacing them with either semi- or full protection (level 1), or full protection only (level 2), each with the same duration as the duration of the pending changes protection, whether or not the originally protecting administrator takes any action with respect to the RfC's closure.  This is due to the fact that any number of BLP subjects have threatened to sue Wikipedia for allowing defamation in their articles, and pending changes has been part of our good faith response.  This cannot easily be determined on-wiki, as most of the complaints and responses are in OTRS, rather than any on-wiki venue.  While I've made my honest best effort to include references to OTRS tickets when appropriate in protection summaries, there's no guarantee that the absence of any such OTRS ticket number indicates that the pending changes can be dropped.  Note also that non-BLP articles may have been placed under pending changes protection for BLP reasons, so an article on e.g., a corporation placed under pending changes protection may not be assumed to be not a BLP-relevant article.  Furthermore, regardless of the merit of such lawsuits, the fact is that Wikipedia's BLP goals are to do no harmit's an ethical stance with worldwide acceptance.
The removal of Pending Changes as a tool does not change our obligation to BLP subjects in any way; it merely removes a tool that allows trusted non-autoconfirmed and non-administrator users to make changes to such articles.  If anyone was under the impression that the end of pending changes would automagically open any protected articles for free-for-all editing, they have likely not thought through the real world implications of BLP.
I trust that this statement clarifies things sufficiently that unilateral un-protection of pending changes-protected articles doesn't become an issue.