I did not quite know what I was talking about before, as I had made some assumptions from my vague impressions.

I just discovered that someone in 2022 changed all of NYs places to reflect their population and not how we designate them legally and culturally. I understand now that this is the current norm, but I am not happy about it.

Whether something is a village or town or city is highly arbitrary, whereas the legal designations are highly precise and highly meaningful. OCM is meant to be globally understood, and uses UK English as a base (boo), but concessions are made for clarity, like using sidewalk instead of pavement. In much of America, a village is often a more dense and urban-like experience than a town, because a town is a rather rural township. It is utterly confusing to me to call my hometown a town, because I grew up calling it a village while the rural place around it was the town. If we continue to use the place= value to reflect an informal, non-legal impression based mainly on population, it becomes highly confusing. Such a use of place= becomes absolutely worthless, while the important, concrete, legal and administrative information is buried away in tiny details.

Anyway, either way Storrs is not a suburb, it's definitely a village. Mansfield is farms and forest, not a town in the UK sense.