At this moment, the poll Alpinist routes marked as footpaths - #39 by Hungerburg is at 6:4 - far from the 3:1 a proposal needs to get accepted. The – a bit related – highway=scramble proposal reached similar result. The community is split on both issues.
From what I observe, when looking at maps or routes produced by consumers of openstreetmap data, they are not sufficiently aware of that highway=path gets used to map mappers ideas of how best to traverse probably dangerous terrain with no on the ground indication.
Is it time to update documentation? How to word that? Who starts the topic?