Do city names change so frequently that they need to be dynamically updated? I can see some use for it when you get to the neighbourhood level to account for local nicknames, but not full cities.
Such a system of differentiation of map elements by likelihood of change could be good in the long term, but it would be a huge undertaking to classify them.
Maybe that's the bug. It didn't occur to me until I read your comment [0] that the system could simply accept user-submitted data only above a certain level of detail. It won't eliminate the damage, but it would keep it more contained.
[0] OTOH, GIS isn't my day-to-day like it would be if I worked at, say, MapBox.
(after all, someone has to be able to edit things like the label for New York)
For instance, there's tens of millions of objects in OSM. Step one to locking some of them is deciding which ones. That alone is a big project.
There are legitimate reasons to edit even the information for major world cities (most of them, for example, don't have translations into all major languages yet), but there's little reason to need those changes to be applied immediately.
You'll still need some way to deal with ongoing edit wars -- I'd imagine the mapping of Jerusalem to be prickly, for example. But at least you can tell that content is dangerous and direct your human review in that direction.
Even better, less than 2 hours.
The entire map is user submitted! It's a wiki map.
OSM isn't finished (and never will be), so we need to keep adding to it. Even the place node for New York (which was edited here) has dozens of different tags as well as just the "place=city name=New York"