I definitely agree we should have the admin boundaries in there.

place=city/town/village/hamlet are typically used to map population/commercial centers.  

Having them in addition to admin boundaries are helpful in a few cases — one main one being if the population center of a municipality isn’t at the center of the admin boundary area.

Another one is like this, where the legally definite municipalities don’t map 1:1 with legally defined municipalities.

What sort of mapping issues were you seeing with the place nodes?  

It looks OSM Carto may only use place node for place labels, and not areas — as right now it looks like the labels for the Barnstable villages are all just gone from the map.