I agree that it would be very helpful to understand Zack’s criteria when deciding how to reclassify a place, and I encourage them to join this thread if they find out about it. One theory I have is that they are interpreting official designations (e.g. a village in Massachusetts or a hamlet in New York) as being synonymous with the OSM ‘place’ value, which is usually not the case.
The few changesets that I reverted were ‘place=village’ nodes in urban areas with plenty of amenities, which completely ignores the Wiki guidelines for such a tag. It is fair to assume that a minority of these changes are correct, but the few that I noticed in Greater Boston were clearly wrong. I do think the changes were made in good faith though, so I would suggest waiting to see if Zack is willing to explain their logic here.