As a general rule of thumb, yes, it is "safe" to uninstall Chocolatey. Chocolatey, for the most part, is simply a wrapper around the native EXE/MSI for the application that is being installed. As a result, removing Chocolatey, does not remove the installed applications.
There are some types of Applications, for instance, Command Line/Portable ones, that will have an adverse effect by removing Chocolatey, so you may want to take some care here. For instance, when installing say GitVersion.Portable, Chocolatey adds a "shortcut" to the resulting EXE in the Chocolatey bin folder (which is on the system path). By uninstalling Chocolatey, this "shortcut" and potentially the EXE itself, will be removed, so this application will no longer function.
I would suggest that you take a look at the Chocolatey\Lib folder, and see which packages you have installed with Chocolatey before uninstalling, so that you can verify that no applications fall into this category.
Hope that helps!
The steps to uninstall Chocolatey are listed here.
As a side note, starting with Chocolatey 0.9.8.27, the default Chocolatey Path is no longer C:\Chocolatey, but rather C:\ProgramData\Chocolatey.
1Surely (given your explanation that some executables may be removed or have links to them removed), the "general" advice should be, "No, it isn't safe"? Only in the specific circumstance where the user is sure that none of the installed software relies in whole or in part on the contents of the choco bin folder should removal be considered harmless. – Bob Sammers – 2016-05-25T11:42:08.467
@BobSammers I generally agree with this statement. Gary's answer probably needs a little updating since it was written almost two years ago and there is more knowledge share on this. – ferventcoder – 2016-05-25T14:54:31.093