I am really not very happy with this, and it flags up a fundamental issue with this sort of tag reworking and bot-fiddling.
As far as I can tell, there has been no outreach to data consumers about this. With my cycle.travel hat on, I haven’t received an email, or a DM, or anything. I presume other significant commercial routers (RWGPS, Komoot, Strava, mapy, etc. etc.) haven’t. I haven’t seen any attempt at PRs for open-source routers either.
This is a problem because you have effectively just worsened routing for a vast number of people relying on OSM for their commute, or leisure ride, or whatever. cycle.travel had subtly different weighting for surface=paving_stones and surface=paving_stones:30. That has now been sacrificed on an altar of tidiness with, in practice, no warning whatsoever.
It is not realistic to expect every data consumer to stumble across an obscure thread posted in the “General talk” area, in amongst the dozens of other messages there every day. As it happens I read these boards and spotted it. But I’m pretty sure that most data consumers won’t.
I understand that this comes from a spirit of “trying to make things better”, but OSM isn’t a tidy data playground any more. We can’t just rewrite big swathes of the database to make it look neater. OSM data is mission-critical to thousands, millions of people and we need to act like it is.
I would ask people to stop this sort of edit until some form of outreach method has been devised and implemented. Maybe this is actually something OSMF could do.
(Secondly, surface=paving_stones:30 is a good tag! You are basically repeating the mistake of highway=path here, replacing meaningful, easily understood tags in widespread usage with complex, fragile structures. Those who do not learn history’s mistakes are condemned to repeat them, etc. But that’s just day-to-day OSM facepalm and not really the issue here.)