Thanks for that clarification.
I do fear that thinking of it as a way will lead to there being more nodes than is absolutely necessary or in the spirit of such pathless routes. That’s not necessarily a strong argument against it.
I feel like areas can be useful to show ambiguity - for some routes (say up to Dragon Pass/Peak) there is a heavily informally cairned area at the side of the lake below it which is a natural place to ascend and could be a set route_bottom. For others it really is just "head up somewhere, anywhere, just make sure you end up at the pass marked as route_top. It might not be worth having an area for the bottom as that could complicate things, instead just leaving it blank and up to map reading skills.
The route could also just be represented by area shapes that show “passable” terrain as was previously suggested by someone else earlier in the thread (Italy mod iirc).
For Valor Pass I know of people that hiked up the ridge on the south side, then dropped as that is a little simpler. We felt perfectly comfortable doing a more direct approach, but stayed above cliff bands (which doesn’t really show as well on opentopo, but with USGS or slope angle shading the map gets noisier for this purpose). This is a pretty vague representation based on my memory - and isn’t entirely accurate as there might be some 2-3m cliffs or ledges etc that could pose a navigational hazard in the middle of that area.
This tells the story pretty well, but is probably a bit overkill and prone to small errors in terrain. In this case just having a node at the top of the pass seems fine to me, the rest doesn’t have any needles that need to be threaded (aside from perhaps the chutes dropping from Valor lake to Ambition, but at some point you have to consider the route to the pass done).
(looking at this, the pass should be moved a little bit to align with the two non-technical approaches to gain the ridge)