Please explain how this is an improvement on how the map was before.

The road now has a big kink in it, which doesn’t exist in reality.

The cycle path now also has a big kink in it, which doesn’t exist in reality. By having it tagged as cycleway=link, the misalignment between the cycleway in the map and on the ground was at least communicated to the consumer of the map before, as cycleway=link is explicitly only for routing purposes.