[brimble]

Semantic tags would have been great if we'd left most or all styling up to browsers and user preference. Agreed that it's of dubious benefit if you can use other means to fix things like a11y (and, as you note, that's totally possible). The idea was probably a zombie as soon as browsers started moving user defined styling to less-prominent areas of the UI, which was a long time ago.

[EDIT] I'd to add that for the specific but now-niche use case of writing HTML by hand (which, in an editor with good tag completion and auto-formatting, I find almost as fast as, and far more powerful than, Markdown) semantic tags can be really nice.