[svat]

Oh yes, definitely, I didn't mean that MathML was a nefarious corporate plot. Just that there's a tension between pragmatists and idealists: in this case those who just want to put math on the web for the common case in any way at all (images, MathJax, whatever works), and those who think/thought that semantics should be encoded, just as you said. (That's what the page I linked says too: "There was a danger during the 1990s that a standard would emerge for mathematical representation on the web that would be based on a TeX[…]-like typesetting language. This would have been disastrous […] To head off this possibility, Wolfram Research and Neil Soiffer decided to do everything they could to […]" etc.)

This tension has played out a few times in practice, e.g. when Wikipedia removed the (added in 2012) MathJax option and went back to images-only (2016? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99369) based to a large extent on arguments from people who are (still) MathML proponents (which I understand Wolfram may not be any more) — at least some of them are "semantic" advocates who believe in "structured" math input rather than "presentation" markup. So there's some conflict there.

(Anyway, this is all historical and unrelated to Wolfram Cloud.)