That’s one way to look at it, but often less is more in cartography. Many general purpose maps, even if outdoors focused, don’t actually want to display these pathless routes at all. They just want to display regular hiking trails. We make this harder than necessary for them by including both things under the same primary feature tag.
Sure they can exclude combinations including a high sac_scale, a low trail_visibility, etc but the fact that this would be necessary is extremely non-obvious. Welcome to OSM. Paths? Oh yes those are tagged highway=path. Well except some things that aren’t paths are also tagged highway=path so you’d better exclude those. How to identify which ones aren’t paths? Well, there are a variety of other tags that are sometime present and sometimes not…