I considered reaching out to jnighan at first before hesitating and ultimately deciding against it because I figured it would not be productive to converse with another person over some few hundred feet of roadway on the map. That's not reaching out to any community (just one person who has documented highway classification in the state), but community consensus for minor edits should technically not be required in the first place. I understand that it's not about all edits in Connecticut—just road-focused ones—but I still cannot see how minor edits to the road network could create accumulate so much so that it turns into a mess, even without aggressively monitoring every change that happens in the state. 

I myself have documented road classification in my home state of Virginia and am responsible for much of how the major roads are classified. If someone adds or removes a trunk or primary route, I'll scrutinize it and likely revert it—I'd expect the same thing to happen in Connecticut or any other state with documented highway classification. However, I would not expect myself or anyone else to scrutinize a change to a roadway so small as 1000 feet of undivided highway or a median break at a signalized intersection, especially if the edits are not breaking anything or going against any proposed state highway guidelines.

You are correct about it being frustrating to me because I feel that it's counterintuitive to require that anybody have to reach out to a particular contributor for confirmation over relatively insignificant edits. If this is procedural for when responding to the edits of a more-experienced editor like me, then I am concerned with how you would take care of edits from new users who are inevitably out of the loop of any "discussion".

I do not yet know what jnighan's opinions on how minor road edits should be handled are, so I will contact him via Slack. As far as I know, though, it seems to mostly be up to you for what should and should not be reverted, which is anti-community in my opinion.

I apologize if my message sounds heated or disregardful, but as someone who has had countless encounters with territorial editors since day one of me editing OSM, I am concerned about the approach to "community" here.