Hello wombatmaper,
"barrier=block" absolutely can be on a way rather than a node.  Have a look at https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/barrier=block - as you can see, there are 1000s of them mapped that way already.
In addition, please use better changeset comments than "resolved issued detected by id" - explained what you did and why you changed it, and what your source for that change was (survey?  Something else?)
Best Regards,
Andy Townsend, on behalf of OSM's Data Working Group.
