Well it depends. In some places, where there is a general right of access on foot then those defaults make sense. Where I am (England) they don’t, and explicitly indicating what foot access there is (whether it’s a legal right, just at the discretion of the landowner and can be taken away at any time or not allowed) is very important.
That should be fine, provided that (a) they actually honour the rights-of-access tagging in OSM and (b) on a country by country basis access rights are tagged senibly in OSM.
That means that in England and Wales you really do need to look at access tags to see what foot access is allowed but in (say) Scotland, you don’t. Unfortunately a number of app developers aren’t good at understanding OSM tagging, partly because the highway=path mess means that using that tag means that it’s impossible to record access properly.
You’re going to have to be more specific and provide examples so that people can look at current tagging, why apps might be misunderstanding that, and what might be a better way of tagging a particular feature.
I can link to an example where something that was historically used as a path was changed in OSM to not be one (at the suggestion of the land managers, with the agreement of most OSM people involved) in order to avoid potential injury or worse to someone “just following an OSM map”.
For completeness, I’m a member of OSM’s Data Working Group and we often get questions like “how do we stop people use app X from using path Y”. Often the answer is “you’ll need to talk to app X about it, since thy are not doing a good job of interpreting OSM data”.