The referential integrity of OSM changesets facilitates reversion anyways. It may not be rendered, but likely still in the database, so what's the point of blindly restricting all forms of deletion?

The aforementioned paths were never 'trails' to begin with, but are merely artifacts of past landuse patterns that are of no intrinsic interest to OSM data consumers, whether they be academic, recreational users, or otherwise.

They appear to have been mindlessly traced from outdated aerial imagery by an indolent armchair mapper who had no interest of providing ground-truthing to their edits.

Every time you edit the basemap, you view graphical representations of OpenStreetMap vector data, so how does that differ in any way from an end user's employ of the data?

Legal information can act as ground truthing for us humans who breathe fresh air and such, so what difference does it make? In my humble, educated opinon, viewing an object with aerial imagery is only *one* such form of ground truthing.

Does this robot, perchance, also interpret the core tenets of personal property laws as well?

I guess facilitating real-world vandalism by-proxy is okay then, right?