Even boroughs of NYC use this tag, so clearly it is not the regular meaning of "suburb" as in the dictionary. I'm also not very convinced by your argument that "communes cannot be tagged as place=village because many communes have large populations". https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dvillage does not indicate anything regarding population. Many communes are mountainous areas, and clearly applying place=town for those doesn't make any sense.