OSM works like Wikipedia. There's no company looking at notes, it's just volunteers. You can also do the modification yourself, it's quite easy, you just need an account.

For that particular case, if you post the URL or location I can take a look if you want.

In which case I'll make an account!

Thanks for putting me right.

So there's no point (is there?) letting any old people send in corrections, and waiting years...?

Actually doing mapping ideally requires a bit more understanding than a map user might want to acquire. So it may make sense to provide a correction and then let people with more expertise apply their knowledge to the problem, rather than stumble about and maybe make more work for somebody else.

Perhaps you notice that (as a gross example too large to be likely) the big field a few kilometres away from you that's used to fly aeroplanes isn't labelled on OSM. You don't know much about maps or aeroplanes, but it's not on there.

If you go into an OSM editor and tell it that's an airport you're probably unintentionally adding false information. Because it probably isn't an airport, there's a good chance OSM cares exactly what it is, like maybe it distinguishes controlled and uncontrolled airfields, maybe it would prefer you label the area one way, and then also label any marked runway (perhaps there isn't one) separately. There's a Wiki full of instructions about the best way to label things. Sometimes there are also local conventions, maybe the Wiki says not to distinguish uncontrolled airfields, but in your area a convention has arisen to add a specific marker for them. All this is stuff that an editor ideally should know, but a random person who thinks "Hey why isn't this on the map" doesn't know.

This is all correct but I think the default map editor does a good job of guiding newcomers for simple edits, and also lets you tag your commit for review if you're in doubt.

For small corrections (such as changing a business from a pub to a store, adding a road, naming a street…) it's perfectly accessible to anyone interested.

For sure for complex edits (like touching important objects such as airports) it's better to make a note if you're not familiar with it.

In some regions you have active mappers looking more at notes, in other areas less. Also many mappers would want to verify before applying the note ... in the end you mostly have many volunteers with their individual intrinsic motivation.

It is useful to report problems as map notes on the website. Less useful than fixing it yourself obviously, but many regions have regular mappers that look through the notes from time to time. So it helps if there are regular contributors caring about the area.

OSM Notes are still useful. But the goal of OSM is a common owned geodatabase, ie a map. I hope eventually every person feels empowered and able to make simple map changes like this.