Considering how many web developers get that particular tag wrong I'm not sure that's actually as unreasonable as it first appears. The number of forms out there on the web that are really just used as a way to group collections of input elements, with no consideration for an action, a method, browser native validation rules, fieldsets, a legend, etc makes me wonder if people actually know HTML at all. Every React, Vue, etc form I look at the source for gathers up input into state and then submits it with a fetch, replicating, but also often breaking, the accessibility and functionality built into the browser.

So yes, maybe being able to implement a form tag in HTML is the mark of a senior dev.

I'm very much on the "this shit's too complicated, we should fix whatever's making us not use the standard features and tools instead of piling this garbage on top" train, but I think a valid defense of doing things in Javascript that could be done in HTML is that, as soon as you need to do any e.g. form validation in JS, it may be simpler to just do all of it there.

The accessibility issue is, of course, a solid counter-argument to running too far with that line of reasoning, and is part of why I'd much rather we put 1/10 the effort we do to constantly re-implementing basic HTML features into unfucking HTML standardization so we can finally have elements good-enough that we don't need to pile JS on top to get what ought to be built-in functionality. But, that's a whole different skillset from programming, and requires far more organization than thousands of devs all independently, or in small teams, working on yet another NIH version of an image upload input. :-/

I see web development is still trying to make something fundamentally ill-suited for its task work by stacking shoddy layer after shoddy layer on top of it, just like it did when I left web development 10 years ago and went back to system programming.

System programming also has its warts, but at least most of the time you don't feel like you're working against the machine.

We're finally getting lots of things (HTML native validation, date and time pickers, etc.) that make JavaScript unnecessary for the things it was commonly used for in the 2000s. Unfortunately, in the mean time, client side scripting has metastasized throughout web applications to the point that things that browsers and HTML actually do implement well (history, keeping your place in the page, accessibility) are generally re-implemented, poorly, by web applications.

Not knowing about it can also qualify you as a very senior dev (though not very up to date with recent improvements) as the form tag was apparently added to the (then informal) HTML format around 1994 ;)

All tags are divs these days.