The 1400 changes I made represent 0.3% of cuisines tags with semicolons, and just 0.1% of all cuisine tags. That is, 99.7% of people were already using the space-less separator.

IMO that's rare enough that data consumers shouldn't have to, or are likely to forget to, handle this case. But also 1400 is large enough that it's worth making sure the information for these restaurants can get used.