Identifying a better solution to a problem is a long way from apathy and contempt. In fact it is how things improve.
Far from your exosuits vs wheelchair comment, this is more like saying that wheelchairs are good enough.
Legs are billions of years old and wheels where invented thousands of years ago. Yet we still use them were they remain most effective. No doubt there is room to improve mobility options, but cost and battery capacity are very real constraints. And sometimes mimicking nature too closely is less effective; i.e. planes without flapping wings.
All that to say the web was born more accessible than magazines. It's probably more effective to maintain that semantic heritage than make machines that can translate flattened images like an interpreter. Still, experimentation is great. Nothing wrong with trying to make the machine. I just wouldn't advise that the whole web forget accessibility because the tools _should_ already exist.
EDIT: fixed typo
That reaction is pretty disappointing really. It's the "crutches are fine, why should they want artificial limbs" that is really kind of insulting.
Words like "apathy and contempt" do not seem to be "just trying to acknowledge that artificial limbs". Instead they are directly saying that people who hope for artificial limbs are apathetic and have contempt for the problem.
In-fact the complete opposite is true.
When the tech is both widespread and affordable, you can start designing for the tech.
Don't even understand what bothers you so much about making pages more screen-reader-accessible in the first place. Great, I'm glad that you have experience in this area and can attest to the fact that screen readers don't always work even when HTML is semantic. But why are you actively resisting semantic HTML?
It sounds to me like you're saying, "It doesn't work well, so we shouldn't usw it at all." What would you prefer, div soup?
It doesn't even need to be the case that semantic HTML is a killer solution for screen reader users. Just needs to be better than nothing once you net costs and benefits.
So I'm genuinely curious: when is it better to not use semantic markup? Or when does the cost of using it become prohibitive?
So I'm genuinely curious: when is it better to not use semantic markup?
It never is - but nevertheless it happens all the time. Perhaps you hadn't noticed it was exactly what this article was about?
But that's beside the point. Your comment is like saying "They have powered exosuits now, so why do we still need to put ramps on buildings for people in wheelchairs?"
I can only hope that your level of apathy and contempt is not shared by more web designers.