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The Western Church is monarchical.
Roman Catholics are under the authority of their parish priests, who are under the authority of their diocesan bishops, who are under the authority of the Pope.
That's the way it is, and nothing I have said proposes changing any of that.

The Eastern Church has very clear lines of authority as well. Bishops are subject to removal under certain circumstances through actions by the laity, but that does not mean that the individual Russian or Greek Orthodox is a free agent who can remove HIMSELF from the authority of the bishop or the Church simply because he disagrees with something. Orthodoxy is not Protestantism. It is Catholicism circa 450 AD. The Orthodox are not free agents or Protestants. They are Catholics of different rites, with a greater degree of participation in the government of their churches. Some Orthodox parish somewhere cannot vote that they don't accept the Holy Trinity anymore, or that there is not the Real Presence of God in the Eucharist, or any other damned thing.

A political analogy is apt again. The Roman Catholic Church is the French Monarchy before the Revolution: absolute. The Eastern Orthodox Churches are the United States Federal government: you get a vote in your governance, but your vote is limited by the Constitution, by law established through long judicial tradition, and by the applicability of the law to you even if your side loses.

The proof that Eastern Orthodoxy's form of governance is well within the pale of holiness is this: it has been 500 or 1000 years, depending on how you measure it, since the Great Schism. And yet all of the things instituted directly by God for access to Himself: the Sacraments, are revered and treated the same in both Churches. The Godly core is there in both. God is fully present in both.

We are simply not talking here about handing the Catholic Church over to ecumenism. Orthodox and Roman reconciliation is not ecumenical. It is the reconciliation of identical twins within the family of One Holy Mother Church. Orthodox and Roman reconciliation is not handing over the Roman Church to the trap of dissent or spiritual "democracy". Roman Catholicism is an absolute monarchy, Eastern Orthodoxy is a constitutional monarchy, and both serve Christ the King.
If anything, the Catholics would find the attitudes of their Orthodox brethren to be those of spiritual hard-asses: unbending, uncompromising.

There is no trap in trying to reunify the Orthodox and Roman Churches. The fact that God has not allowed either to lapse into sacramental sin despite 1000 years of Schism shows that God has preserved each, probably to teach us a lesson in Christian charity and comity. God wants the Church united. Whereas Protestantism broke forcibly with Rome, Rome presumed to "throw out" the Orthodox. This is a different thing. And subsequent historical development demonstrates the extent to which this is different: God hasn't let either branch of the Church lose the purity of the sacraments. We are meant to put this back together.
And the lesson we are meant to learn from this is to not use the monarchical power of the Church to overbear our fellow believing Catholic Christians. That was not its purpose in historical development. Remember: it was a Western change, attempted to be imposed by monarchical authority, that led to the Schism. If we rolled back to the day before that change and only moved forward with persuasion and conciliar gestures, rather than attempts at command and brute force, we would not have separated.

But that lesson probably could not be learned without tragedy. Well, we have learnt it, and learnt it well. For that Schism led to two Churches that God preserved holy and sacramental. But the lesson of the hardening of authority was not learned, and the Protestant Reformation may yet prove irreparable (or rather, will prove irreparable UNTIL Orthodoxy and Romanism are within the Catholic Church again. For Alabama will never, ever, ever obey an imperious Roman command again, BUT the faithful Alabamian is apt to be drawn into the Orthodox Rite, for complicated reasons having to do with the faith of God.

On the other side of the coin, a unified Church would have been better able to throw back the Muslim challenge. Divided, the West let the East fall and the misery of oppression lives on to this day.

Orthodox/Catholic reconciliation contains none of the threat of incipient Protestantism that you fear. It does contain an implicit threat of a return to the Latin Rite in the West. And that would not be such a terrible thing.