What you said was "The former program destroyed any belief that we might be able to use formal tactics to analyze truth or other semantics." That description is

What you said was "The former program destroyed any belief that we might be able to use formal tactics to analyze truth or other semantics." That description is quite vague, which was what my question suggested. Tarski's work described a criterion for a theory of truth for a language, and showed how to give a compositional semantics for some formal languages. As you noted, that language does not define its own truth predicate, to avoid paradox, but this is a formal analysis of truth. His work, along with Gödel's, ended the logicist program, but not formal treatments of semantic concepts. P.S. Don't assume what others have or haven't read. I can't claim any expertise, but I took a graduate seminar on the theory of truth taught by Anil Gupta. That doesn't mean I'm right, of course.