default_language’s blast radius is too large for any data consumer to use for any use case that involves reuse or caching. Think of all the commotion whenever the coastline breaks and floods the world, or when the Great Lakes dry up, and how long it takes for the Standard layer to recover. Now imagine that multiplied by literally everything in a country at every zoom level. No changeset can cause anywhere near that scale of disruption by modifying individual name tags. Meanwhile, any legitimate change to a default_language tag would require modifying every name tag in the country. This is one of those ideas that sounds great on paper until considering how OSM is produced.
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