The benefits of some new elements, e.g. <article> and <section> as opposed to <div> are more subtle, but <time> has a number of use cases beyond improved access

The benefits of some new elements, e.g. <article> and <section> as opposed to <div> are more subtle, but <time> has a number of use cases beyond improved accessibility. Right now, if you're a developer wanting to display dates and times in the user's timeline you have to write custom JS, but if encoded as <time> this job could be done by standardised JS libraries, widely distributed browser extensions or even browsers themselves. Similarly, users could set their browsers to always (or just on request, e.g. as a contextual pop up) display times in 24h system or in their local non-gregorian calendar, which would help especially children or people with less education to understand more of the web.