Funny you should say that, because I just checked it out myself today with my body cam recording and mounted to the handlebars of my bike, and after seeing the water level below that of the cycleway and that it was passing under via a couple of large pipes that could be considered a mini-culvert I'm ready to concede that you were correct and that I was wrong! A ford is generally built (or is naturally-occuring) such that the water is flowing across the way all the time, but here it looks like the Champaign Parks District at least attempted to have the cycleway cross above the water level, even though it doesn't take much more flow for it to rise above the level of the cycleway and turn it into a ford. Which explains why when I first checked it out back in 2020 and then again sometime later the water was flowing over the cycleway.

It's too bad OSM doesn't have a way to upload photographs as I could get stills from my video and upload them and along with your photographs we could compare notes. I suppose I could set up a (temporary) web server for the purpose but I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far.

Bottom line: if you want to change it to be temporarily flooded from a ford, go ahead. 