Here are some overpass queries showing before and after that may help:
- Current place=city nodes in Maine
- place=city nodes in Maine on 2024-03-24 (before lots of downgrading)
It seems like there may have been a few too many place=city nodes in Maine beforehand, but currently things may be too sparse. For comparison, in Vermont we have only four place=city nodes and we’ve been discussing possibly cutting that back to just one (Burlington). In OSM terms, place=town is already a fairly significant settlement, but we’ve yet to come up with clear guidelines to distinguish between place=town and place=city in New England, or the US more broadly really.