[zachrip]

> Also, maybe I am too jaded by working at orgs that don't care about a11y, but any indication that any amount of thought has been put into a11y issues is the opposite of a code smell to me.

You can actually reduce accessibility by misusing aria attributes. Folks should try to use semantic elements first. Then if those aren't meeting their needs (please try to make them meet your needs), there are good, well tested implementations of the common aria patterns (https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/) for frameworks like react. Some examples of this are radix and ariakit.