I do not share those expectations. If a category has a setting then I would not expect that setting to be changed because you changed a setting somewhere else.

You do however have the option to make it inherit if you so wish by explicitly setting the subcategory to inherit

This means that for a larger website we have to manually set the workflow setting to 'inherit' in each subcategory.

When you create the category then you should set it to inherit if that's what you desire.

Sure, I understand that and I do it that way - on a website where the workflows are already active. I'm talking about a case with an extensive website (>1000 categories) where five separate workflows are to be defined for five main categories with >500 subcategories. And here I had the 'nasty surprise' that all subcategories are set to basic workflow. In my opinion, that's a bad idea because the 'inheritance' use case is the typical one - since the workflow is more likely to be used on extensive websites.