Actually the way it works is staff members see a count of pending posts at the bottom of a topic with a link to review them. Something like: “There are X pending posts in this topic.”
Of course they also see them in the site header.
The user who posts the pending post also sees their pending posts at the bottom of the topic, with the option to withdraw them. In this case they see the full contents of the post.
There is no way for other regular users to see the pending content, and I’m pretty sure it should stay that way?