Hello,
The update seems to be only on the French page, the German and the English version don’t mention anything about it.
I agree with you, there are so many nodes in the Swiss hiking network that creating a route for every possible connection between them would become extremely tedious. But using the route relation to describe unordered local collections of ways feels to me like abusing the concept of a route. From a route I expect that it takes me on a trip from A to B or on a round trip. And maybe a relation is not even needed here.
Basically, what you want is to designate ways as members of the Swiss hiking network. This could be simply expressed by using the tag network=iwn/nwn/rwn/lwn on ways instead of routes only. Or maybe even creating a subkey highway:network=* would make sense, I don’t know if similar problems have emerged for other highway types than hiking paths. But as far as I see, determining the network membership of a way is all that is needed, for the distinction between “hiking”, “mountain hiking” and “alpine hiking” there is already the sac_scale tag.
Shernott