"Was it not disrespectful to do a mass deletion in the first place?"
***A mass deletion of low quality data from an 15 year old import. Not a mass deletion of data into which someone put a lot of effort.
I don't see how that's disrespectful to anyone.
"It's obvious to anyone that that's against community guidelines." - Deleting low quality imported data in order to improve is againest community guidelines now, noted, will not happen again.
...funny that you're here telling me stories about "community guidelines" when you massively broke those exact guidelines 2 months ago, thats quite hypocritical (CS133425452&133388647+hundreds more for reference)

"you're not even willing to consider a situation in which your well-intentioned work may have done more harm than good."
Of course I have! But other than the unconnected poles/towers, which was the original problem, I don't see any other harm. And I fixed those, because the deletion of these specific ways actually caused harm. If I wouldn't have considered that this CS harmed something, I wouldn't have spend my time finding&restoring those ways. By "sides", I mean simply people seeing this changeset as positive and people seeing it as negative.

I'd never expect that even deleting poor tiger data (in order to efficiently improve it) at a bit larger scale offends some people that much - but certainly important to know, I guess