The Korean gov’t employs small Korean AI companies to build bots thats endlessly scrape the internet and harass websites that post unfavorable content about Korea. They label it as “korean error news,” but the standard boils down to more or less “anything that speaks of Korean in negative light.”
This gives off the same vibes. But this is Korea. They will probably give up in a month or so and move on to whatever else they think will help make them rich overnight.
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?
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.