In that case, I think you were right and the mapper that removed the path from the map was wrong. Doubly so if you personally visited the site and mapped it and an armchair mapper removed it!
In my area, the topography is the result of glacial retreat from the last ice age. It is common to have sections of bare rock in otherwise forested areas. So a trail will follow a dirt rut for awhile but then transit over bare rock for awhile, and then resume the dirt rut. If it is a longer stretch of bare rock, it is common to paint trail blazes (markings) on the rock. We always map the highway=path across these.
One of the more prominent places where this occurs is on mountain tops which, in New England, tend to be above the tree line only for the tallest mountains in the area.
For example, see Mount Mansfield, which is Vermont’s highest peak, and also a place I’ve personally hiked. Above the tree line, the path is mapped straight over the bare rock and hikers follow cairns and blazes. It’s a very popular trail and hikers have no trouble following it. The famous Appalachian Trail and Long Trail go over this mountain.
If we were to remove highway=path from this section and replace it with some other tag that is not immediately understood by data consumers, it would make the user experience for OSM and OSM-based maps immediately worse for any application that consumes map data on Mount Mansfield.
Now, on the flip side, awhile back @Hungerburg proposed highway=scramble to tag scrambles, which is in-between what we commonly consider a path and what would qualify for tagging as a climbing pitch. There was a fair amount of support for this, but ultimately not enough to make the change.
In the case of scramble at least, if highway=path started disappearing from data consumers in locations where there’s a scramble, that might not be a wrong outcome. Scrambles are far more of an outlier on the path spectrum than are ones that have low visibility.