> During that period you will maintain access to any of your public images.
The only reason that sentence would be in there is if after that period you would lose access to the public images! And from Merriam-Webster, "access", verb, definition two: "to open or load (a computer file, an Internet site, etc.) a file that can be accessed by many users at the same time".
> it wasn't clear what we were going to do about the images.
No, it was quite clear; after the 30 day period we would not be able to pull the images. That's what the announcement said. It was not ambiguous. That may not have been the policy or what was intended to be announced, but the issue here isn't a lack of clarity.
(Also, letting the images stay accessible but disallowing any changes is only marginally better than just removing them, so the current policy - whether or not it's the same as the originally announced policy - is still terrible.)