For many businesses, there's a simple incentive that should make them care: SEO. Although Google and other search engines have said for more than a decade that

For many businesses, there's a simple incentive that should make them care: SEO. Although Google and other search engines have said for more than a decade that their bots can execute javascript and navigate SPAs, the truth is that they are not going to simulate a click on every random element with onClick events attached. In many cases, they will not even execute any javascript. Even in 2023, <a href="URL"> is the best way to make search engines pay attention. Popular frontend development patterns have also made it nearly impossible to figure out the semantic structure of a page. Everything is a <div> now. But if you care about how your website looks in a search result, you might still want to designate some parts of the page as <main> or <article> and other parts as <aside> or <nav>. This is especially important if your website contains short user-generated snippets (like tweets) along with a lot of auxiliary information, as semantic tags make it easier for search engines to determine what the main content of each URL is. In short, many websites would still benefit from enforcing proper semantic markup, like we used to do in the good ol' days of the "no tables for layout" crusade. Now if the business doesn't care about SEO at all (an increasingly common attitude as websites become app-ified), there's always the atomic option: talk to the legal department about the possible consequences of ignoring accessibility.