More affected files, in case they are helpful:

Any life here? Do I need to collect consensus or anything like that?

Both changes are moving forward, PD-US isn't the same thing as PD-US-expired. PD-US is a very broad template that isn't specific about the PD reason, which is probably the reason for the original change to the specific PD-1923. More recently, PD-1923 now actually refers to a year that moves up every year, so it was renamed to PD-US-expired as the old name is no longer accurate.

I ran into this problem when trying to do some maintenance on Commons:Template:PD-US-expired. We had to search for uses of the various Autotranslate/clone_N templates to try to find one that wouldn't appear in the same stack as PD-US-expired. It's kind of a mess. The problem is also more severe now because the parser will not parse the looped template at all, instead inserting an error message.

Aha, of course. Thank you.

I'm very confused by your Berlin demo page. The properties being fetched are P734 (family name) and P756 (removed feature), and they are being fetched from Q81559 ('Complete Discography', a musical album). That item does not have either of these properties, yet they are displaying values. I see "Arkenberge, This is not true" and "Michael Müller", neither of which appears to have any relation with Q81559 or the properties being accessed.