Subject. The chibi tag is full of bodytypes that are explicitly not following the TDM rule of roughly 1:1 head to body ratio, so making TDM alias to chibi just makes actual TDM content harder to find. I can't be alone in recognizing this, right? Can we talk about separating the two again?

first off, nobody knows what the fuck "tdm" means. it, like "ntr", "qvc", "cnc", and whatever other initialisms people use for stuff, are just random strings letters to anyone who aren't already in the know, so it's a bad tag name. TDM especially so, because literally like, no one uses that term anywhere else on the english-speaking internet, and on Pixiv the first time I'm seeing it used to tag something with a character close to the described body-shape (other than characters literally from TDM, the manga) was in like 2020 and there's only like ~1500 total.

second, this seems like a distinction with little actual difference, I'm not seeing much of the stuff that used to be tagged with tdm that's very definitively different from just normal chibis.

would using the full length name of the tag be better?
"teitoushin deformed mascot"?
And in response to the second part, the chibi tag on e621 has been used to describe any type of simplified abstraction from the original design, instead of purely following the bodytype that people associate with chibi. While quite wordy, and, I'll agree, a bit obscure, the teitoushin deformed mascot tag could be a good way to distinguish the two without needing a mass culling of the chibi tag. I dunno, the whole reason people were distinguishing between the two in the first place was because finding TDM content in the chibi tag was proving to be a chore.

I know of this concept and seem to recall even writing a wiki, but I wonder if we can't just use a combo similar to chibi huge_head instead. post #4475428 is a dead ringer for TDM content.
The head scale tags are going to be infinitely greater for readability than an obscure Japanese initialism, as long as there's something to cover the simplistic cartoon body I think we're golden.