Yes. We don’t draw separate “lanes” (i.e. only floor markings) as separate OSM ways, so in that case one would just use additional tags instead of drawing separate ways (see e.g. Pedestrian lane on the road)
And also yes, sometimes the footpaths diverge from the road or have some special reasons (e.g. become bridges, crosses the road, etc) that makes it reasonable to always map such cases as separate ways.
But this historic lack of consensus (which is being talked about here) was never about either of those two categories mentioned above (which happen to be minority of cases globally).
The lack of consensus was instead about remaining 95% (or whatever) of footways that could reasonably be tagged either as a separate way (with advantage of allowing for more details and precision) or as additional tags (with advantage of being vastly easier and faster)