Well, yes, in general I don't hesitate to contact the community if there is some ambiguity. But in this case to me the edit was clear: The boundaries were consistently tagged as historic (so no longer in use) and that agreed with the information to be found on Wikipedia saying they had been abolished. It's by far not the first case I see where the admin structure changes and boundaries become obsolete, but not all of the related tagging is updated, potentially causing inconsistencies on data consumers' end. 

Nominatim has more uses than just address data. In my case the app I help maintain relies on the full administrative boundary hierarchy that it delivers. Objects marked as historic shouldn't even appear in Nominatim results. In this case it was only due to the inconsistent tagging that counties were still appearing there.