I agree that the current behavior is less than ideal.
For now, you should be able to work around that by using Find and Replace.
(Edit: I updated the post to include a slightly more robust method)
- Find: name of the “parent tag” preceded by the
^symbol and followed by the $ symbol - Replace With: leave empty
- In: Tags
- Selected notes only: yes/no depending on what you want to do
- Ignore case: yes
- Treat input as regular expression: yes
E.g. if you had these tags: Arts, Arts::Paintings, Arts::Sculpture and you wanted to remove Arts
If you had these tags: Arts::Paintings, Arts::Paintings::Impressionism, Arts::Paintings::Expressionism and you wanted to remove Arts::Paintings
I recommend creating a backup first!