How is place=municipality used correctly and are there country/state-specific rules not to use it at all?

I feel this pain and I’d agree, except that a substantial portion of the Cebuano-linked items do represent real places and parks. Anecdotally, the conflation issue represents probably about 1 in 20 items that I’ve encountered, which is spectacularly awful, but I’ve also seen people overcorrect by falsely merging Cebuano-linked items based on the name alone. That kind of conflation can be tricky to untangle, especially if it spreads to OSM.

As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.