The move away from expressway==trunk toward splitting those meanings into a separate expressway=yes and highway=* meaning connectivity-importance involved 17 participants on almost 70 messages on the [talk-us] mailing list beginning in May 2021 followed by more than 50 participants writing over 4,000 messages in the #highway-classification channel of the OSM-US Slack up to May 2022, with many more since. I talked about this history at SOTM-US last year: https://youtu.be/jWQUldGg43A

Rather than hiding the distinct American concept of expressways, we're actually trying to highlight them by shifting to a distinct expressway=yes tag that explicitly and clearly means what it says. America is a place of much varied and patchwork infrastructure with many highways getting upgraded to expressway-level infrastructure in segments. While OSM-Carto does not support distinct rendering of this tag, other renders do. See the Austin, TX area in the OSM-Americana renderer for a good example of a mixture of highway=primary+expressway=yes roads that connect within the city as as well as highway=trunk roads that connect between important regional centers that alternate between expressway-level infrastructure and not:
https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/#map=10.51/30.393/-97.6344

I don't have local knowledge of the roadway at hand and which sections are expressways or not, but I can see that it parallels a motorway and isn't itself the main connector between significant regional cities. highway=primary probably makes sense if it is the most important local road within a city.