The cost of doing accessibility is the cost of doing accessibility testing. If you're not actually testing your accessibility work, using a button instead of a div is pissing in the wind.
Maybe, maybe not. ("Surely" using the browser's CSS animations would be more efficient than reimplementing them yourself in JavaScript - but if actually you benchmark it, the opposite is true). If you're not actually testing it, how could you possibly know?
For what kind of site? If you just use semantic HTML as this article recommends, the cost is quite low for development, and your QA people should already know the basics of accessibility testing.