After reading all comments, here my 10 cts, how about common sense by the users or readers ?
40 years ago, I thought a harness to be used as climbing gear to lift people, while its a safety measure while climbing yourself. And don’t use sandals or clogs as mountain shoes, which come in quiet different classes or a car map 1:200.000 instead of a topographic map scale 1:25.000.
Tagging paths indeed needs some improvements. It would help if OSM database recognizes that difference among walking path, hiking trail and alpine climb is significant and required different type of highways instead of subtle and often hard to understand, implement and render decorations with additional tags.
Situation with tagging paths is like if we have just one type of highway for the all roads and then have do make distinction using additional tags. For roads that is not the case. Various types of roads are recognized as different highway types which is logical, useful and very helpful. Same should be with various types of paths. there should not be just one type of path highway.
I would not worry much about updating existing data. If tagged correctly, most of them could be automatically updated to new highway types.
And that would indeed make some force one renderers to pay more attention to rendering such highways. For start, all those that do not render them properly now, would stop rendering them at all, as that would be new highways, they do not recognize - until they update, meaning pay attention.
Other than resolving issues like this which initiated discussion, it would help properly tag all other pedestrian ways, especially in rural and mountain areas. It seems like that people who designed highway tagging scheme did not pay much attention on way objects other than regular urban traffic. Tagging pedestrian ways out of urban areas is quite lacking.
So, I would gladly vote for adding new types of highways to differentiate walking paths, hiking trails and alpine climbs as such. Those three I meet regularly but I guess there are more types that could be considered too.
Adding it here as it fits - but so far in OSM we miss mountaineering difficulty!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(climbing)
I was just trailrunning/hiking in Nepal in Makalu and Everest region - and sac_scale=difficult_alpine_hiking is simply insufficient to describe some high altitude alpine passes like Amphu Labsta or Tashi Labsta - they are commonly rated with the International French adjectival system (IFAS)
as linked above on Wikipedia.
I think we should add this as
climbing:grade:ifas=* and tag the path that belongs to it as route=climbing for D or above, and keep it as highway=path up to PD.
Of course for F-PD maybe AD there is an overlap with the sac_scale so both should/can be used.
This would for example also applies to the trails/routes on mount everest, K2 and so on which are rusually ated by this system too.