Freely available and openly editable maps might be one of the things that we take for granted, but are simply an abberation of a brief period of peace and civility; now we'll return to the default hobbesian state of affairs.
See also: beautiful, detailed aerial photos of oil refineries posted by amateur drone photographers to public sites. Submarine cables and oil tankers, carrying the world economy on their shoulders without any protection out there at sea.
So, a handful of persons "believe that OpenStreetMap is a creation of Chinese communists" and are removing specific data from OpenStreetMap, and the OP explains why this is stupid but innocuous.
But that's not the first time that a community is tagged "Chinese communists" and attacked as such. Now imagine if some maga/alt-right/whatever leaders asked their followers to attack the "communist" OpenStreetMap by injecting a bit of false data everyday. Could OSM defend itself as easily?
See also: beautiful, detailed aerial photos of oil refineries posted by amateur drone photographers to public sites. Submarine cables and oil tankers, carrying the world economy on their shoulders without any protection out there at sea.
But that's not the first time that a community is tagged "Chinese communists" and attacked as such. Now imagine if some maga/alt-right/whatever leaders asked their followers to attack the "communist" OpenStreetMap by injecting a bit of false data everyday. Could OSM defend itself as easily?