Consider other uses of the tag. if I’m looking for a tram stop, a pre-metro station is very much not what I expect, when they look like metro/subway/underground stations. It is only when a tram rather than a train appears that the casual visitor would notice the difference. I support marking them as subway stations, and am slightly amazed that it’s still a pre-metro (I first used it around 1985).
Note that, Antwerp, at least, also has pre-metro stations including Groenplaats (which I first used in 1976). I’d be a bit more ambivalent about the Antwerp pre-metro because it is entirely a tram network, but the major stations have much more of a feel of metro stations rather than tram stops.
At least one Manchester tram stop (Piccadilly) is constructed like a metro station as well.
In the Brussels and Antwerp cases entrances to these stations are tagged with railway=subway_entrance, which also suggests subway as the station type. Access to these, particularly for people with limited mobility or sight is a very different matter to access to the platforms of a typical tram stop.