That would make sense if everyone that used this tag chose it very carefully.
But with crossing=zebra, how many of those 465,172 uses were from iD presets?
How many of them were from people going “well I guess it’s got painted bars so it’s a zebra crossing”?
Here in Toronto we’ve had hundreds if not thousands of crossings that went from being tagged crossing_ref=zebra to crossing:markings=zebra like this one, or were crossing=zebra like this one or this one… and the actually correct tag for all of those is crossing:markings=ladder.