Above I used ohsome dashboard to get at the numbers, in my area about two to three percent of what is highway=path likely to be shared use paths. This is just a small area though (Tyrol). So I looked at taginfo for Austria:
5.6% of path has foot=designated and 4.76 has bicycle=designated, 4.3% has segregated – that a sure indicator, that this is a shared use path. (Beware: above numbers in km, taginfo numbers in mapped entities.) The numbers would push me to push for something like:
As clearly can be seen the reason why path was introduced in the beginning, to make it possible to map multi-use features
(and single-use features the same), is drowned by other mappings. No wonder, the access default for path in Austria for bicycle is “dismount”, because paths only exist in the woods (so the reasoning there.) Personally, I’d rather opt for hw=trail instead for the masses, because the mup’s align much better with foot_scale=casual, sac_scale=strolling, &c.
I recently learned, in the Netherlands there are paths (pad) 8+m wide and paved; so even if the term path for that was unintuitive in my area, at least it is intuitive in other parts of the world.
For English natives, path and trail might ring the same, but if it was for openstreetmap’s ontology that they are different, I’d say, why not?