Google employs _engineers_ to figure out the truth. If an import pipeline is causing problems, a higher-up can just say “stop doing that or we’ll stop your pay cheque”.

OSM doesn’t have that option. If it didn’t have these guardrails in place, a million CS students will see some open-looking data (or not even that, maybe something scraped) and throw it into OSM with a cursory Python script, resulting in an almighty mess. We need the process because we don’t have Google’s leverage of “we pay you”.