while it is not a problem to occasionally merge ways with identical properties, I would not think it is something we should (semi) automatically do on the planet scale, as it creates a lot of unnecessary history noise and disruption (it becomes harder to see the history of the ways that get deleted in the merge).
It is clearly beneficial in extreme situations where ways are chopped into tiny segments for no reason, like Mateusz example, I have also seen something like this (rarely).
Roadways are split anyway for many reasons and for displaying street names this means you have to deal with it anyway (e.g. create a merged way for the name display).
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