[rglullis]

Again, not true. Take a look at the HTML from the Zen Garden page and you will see it is very semantic.

Also, just anecdotal: I am working on a Vue.js component which I want people to customize the styling however they want. This is forcing me to drop the CSS part of the components. I am not adding any cruft HTML and yet I did manage to get a "basic" theme and a good chunk of the "materialize" look already. Two themes, two separate SASS projects. It can be done.

[thinkloop]

The main (only?) way html affects style is containment - the hierarchical nature of it and the ability for components to be "inside" other components. I feel like I already bump into this issue quite often with something as basic as whether an <input> should be inside the <label> or next to it. The only way, I believe, to resolve containment issues is with absolute positioning (right?). Given enough time and change requests, every element will eventually have to become absolutely positioned, which would become a mess - do you agree with this and how do you handle it?

[rglullis]

I am not a frontend specialist, but "display:grid" solved a lot of these issues for me. You can define even template areas and make things responsive with align-self, justify-self and related directives.