The point you're missing is that I'm not the one suggesting a change here - you are.
The "standard" you're claiming exists really doesn't, it is nothing more than (your) personal preference. Some folks will agree with that preference, others won't.

There's entire road networks that are not mapped the way you're claiming is the norm.
The status quo is simply that there is no (community-approved) standard for whether to include the refs on the ways if they're already on the relation. If you want to change that, again, please follow the proposal process to establish a standard (be that to always include them, never include them, or something in between). Until then, mappers will do what makes the most sense to them. For me personally, that means not duplicating the refs and fake-tagging them as attributes of ways, when semantically, they're really attributes of the relation, just to satisfy a renderer.

TIGER or not was not the point - the point was that your "but there's a lot of examples on the map that support my preference, and that makes it the standard" argument is flawed.

The process you're describing (=filling in stuff based on history that may or may not have been right) and without verifying whether these segments are actually currently(!) part of that route, is precisely what I expected, and why I believe these are undiscussed mechanical edits. The part that is clearly missing is verification that each of the segments you tagged is indeed part of the route right now.