Please could you explain what benefit this has and point me to where this mechanical edit was discussed?

There is no reference to direction=* being deprecated for public_transport=stop_position on the wiki https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:public_transport%3Dstop_position

There may also be consumers of OSM data for purposes of non-bus routing which might find the presence and direction of a stop_position node useful. Those consumers should not need to consume and process every bus route relation to which the node belongs in order to infer the direction. That is why I have tended to add this and why I object to its removal without prior discussion.

Please could you open a discussion about this at https://community.openstreetmap.org/