I'm pretty sure you can resign with a lot less "drama", for the lack of a better word. Simply make the PR remove people from the moderators list and say "We don't want to be moderators anymore", but instead they give clues to what could have happen for them to take this action.
I guess you can say that their action was "semi-public". It wasn't trying to be completely private, and neither completely public, but somewhere in-between.
>I'm pretty sure you can resign with a lot less "drama"
I am not sure you can, unless you play the politician bit and lie about "wanting to spend more time with family" or "health reasons".
If they resigned without any statement, people would have noticed as well, and speculation and gossiping would be still rampant, if not more rampant, because it's not every day that the entire Rust moderation team resigns.
They are between a rock and a hard place, if their objective really was to avoid public drama. Give too little detail and you're entirely at the mercy of speculation and maybe whatever the opposing party puts out (without other people even knowing who that opposing party is). Give too much information and you may irrevocably hurt people (like victims, or even the accused when a mob comes for them) or the community as a whole.
But if you just say "we don't want to be moderators anymore" nothing would change would it? The whole point of the statement is that the mod-team believes something in the organisational structure needs to change.
I would explain what went wrong. It's clear that their organizational suggestions were prompted by a member of the core team doing something they consider terribly wrong - how can it be so bad the Rust community has to know about it yet not bad enough that the community needs to know what it was?
I guess you can say that their action was "semi-public". It wasn't trying to be completely private, and neither completely public, but somewhere in-between.