Yes, this is what I mean by a thematic layer. After all, “land use/land cover” is a typical checkbox on a GIS map’s layer selector and a typical chapter in a well-rounded atlas. I’m not suggesting that we replace landuse outright, but if we were to do so, we would have to think about all the complexity hidden behind these general categories.
What observable characteristics of a spot of land make it industrial in our eyes? The factories, certainly, but also the equipment strewn about, the disorganized patches of paved and unpaved surface that no one bothers to landscape, the expectation that pedestrians usually have no business there, even if they’re legally permitted, the noise, the smell, and so on.
All of this can be as true of the named, partially fenced-in premises of a private entity as it is true of a contiguous swath of land operated by multiple such entities. But we don’t necessarily have an intuitive, precise word for every instance of the former – witness the uncertainty about how to classify a depot or yard. So in case of doubt, we fall back to tagging it as a landuse area, since at least we can say that much about what the name is applied to and what the fence fences in.
There’s no tag to explicitly distinguish the mapping of these more “deliberate” land use areas from the 50,000-foot land use mapping. Thus the need to occasionally cut one out of the other or accept some overlap.