[acdha]

“better” is too strong: in many cases, structured data is not a problem (and if it is, people will scrape it anyway), but there's simply no business case for spending time on it. Most of the semweb stack had a horrible developer experience — bad documentation, tools, validators, etc. — and rarely had tangible benefit from spending time slogging through it.

The semantic data which has actually been implemented on a wide scale happened because someone could go to their boss and say “Spending time on x will mean better Google ranking” or “Facebook will use their new sharing display for our pages”, and it was orders of magnitude simpler to implement so the time and risk were far more palatable.