Like “track”, “path” has multiple disparate meanings in English. It can certainly refer to an urban thoroughfare of solid construction. In fact, that’s typical of a “bike path” or “shared use path”. At the same time, apparently some dialects would also apply it to the faintest of footsteps or animal tracks. Great choice for a keyword, don’t you think?
I don’t want to be too critical of the highway=path proposal’s authors. They had great ideas: provide an option for a path that we know little about, and for a shared use path that for whatever reason can’t be categorized as a footway or cycleway. The only problem is that they tried to solve both problems simultaneously with a single highway=* value.