> I presume that "Please write at bot approval thread." means "please reply on the mailing list" to prevent part of this change from occurring" I did that and you ignored the request.

Argghhh. Now I understand how it looked from your side and I agree that it was also reasonable to interpret it this way.

>  What you are doing is akin to setting everything to "highway=road" because you can't be bothered to survey or look at imagery.

I would argue that setting highway=unknown_type to highway=road would be helpful and useful because it is detected by many tools, while no actual data is lost

> Changing these to shop=yes means that they get lost in https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1v54 , which means that they will just get ignored, like the other 180k examples.

(1) being findable in one go with other standalone shop=yes is in my opinion actually friendlier to people looking to fix them 

(2) standalone shop=yes are being processed - just a single tool (where checking POI count is easy) resulted in fixes to 6000 shop=yes in 2022, and this one is not really important in this context. Similarly, other tools would never list shop=fixme and other rarely used values (and going through all rarely used shop=* values is not really effective - either when looking at taginfo or by looking at nearby undocumented values)