Thanks for updating this.

We have a lot of this, which is essentially tagging for the renderer and doesn't work properly for routing where there isn't a highway=footway/cycleway way.

However, rather than deleting the surrounding footway areas, could I suggest replacing them with area:highway=footway (areas around a linear way) or area:highway=traffic_island?

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:area:highway%3Dfootway
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Street_area#traffic_island