I.e. they ruled that any mass changes based on administrative declarations weren't OK, but changing street names was fine if the on the ground signage had been changed.
So either what I and the person in charge of it are saying is inaccurate, or what you are saying is inaccurate.
This falls under criteria #3 on the linked page[1] and as far as I can tell is being done with the same "on the ground" rule that OSM has always used.
The exception you're linking to is relevant to what country relation and similar data structures Crimea is in. The usual application of the rule would be to have it Russia only, but it's in both Russia and Ukraine.
Almost nobody who uses OSM ever has to deal with country relations, so implying that this is some major policy change is blowing things out of proportion.
It also seems like the least bad way to mark up the data to me. To the extent that geopolitical borders mean anything it's in fact the case that Crimea is still to some extent Ukranian, even though Russia has "on the ground" control. I.e. various other countries have sanctions etc. in place that recognize that that's the case, as opposed to the rest of Russia.
If WWII happened today wouldn't the most useful thing for OSM to do to still have say the Channel islands in the UK to some extent in 1943, and under Axis control? I.e. to have overlapping claims of sovereignty, and simply add disputed/occupied relations on top of those?
1. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DW...
You are right that this exception is not all-encompassing of everything pertaining to Crimea.
The linked page specifically addresses this, and shows that you're wrong about that.
If the Russians update a street sign in Crimea it's OSM general policy that the data should be updated to reflect that.
You then moved the goal post to there being some specific exception to general policies relating to Crimea.
That's true, but nobody in this thread claimed that wasn't the case. I'm saying that you're misrepresenting those exceptions.