“what is rendered on one particular map” has absolutely no bearing on “whether things should be tagged or not”. It’d be entirely reasonable for a renderer to deliberately not show sidewalk names (or only show them if other criteria are met, or if there was no overlap or clutter) but for a router to go out of its way to try and find sidewalk names for display in a route.
(FWIW I don’t have a view on name vs is_sidepath:of:name vs street:namesince for mkgmap routing I support all 3 but for rendering remove all 3).
Yes, you put it better than I did. I still hope pedestrian-centric routers will implement an inference mechanism akin to the one I prototyped, as a steppingstone to more intuitive guidance instructions. Until then, we’re just chipping away at the level-of-detail problem. On the bright side, if all the street:name=* or is_sidepath:of:name=* tagging ends up being redundant eventually, it won’t be a continuing data maintenance burden (other than some RSI).