But if the working groups continue to pretend HTML is for text documents instead of web applications, things will never get more semantic.
I mean, HTML is and will always forever be a system to display a few pages of text with some images thrown in. And even for that it sucks big time.
Anything standards committees have been throwing at it over the years are just haphazard hacks to make it into something it's not with no coherent goal in mind.
You know, there are still people alive who lived through this Golden Age of 10 years ago? 20 years ago? And they call bullshit on your statement.
To pretend that there was some time when, unlike now, people wrote semantic HTML en masse is silly.
Everyone I knew in the field was doing the same, Zeldman / ALA was everyone’s hero, UX, accessibility and standards compliance were the highlights of every project, not tooling or frameworks. Not saying everything was perfect but the focus was clearly different.
Indeed, not in the past 7-8 years. But we used to do it, and the outcome was great - semantic, accessible and machine-readable HTML was the norm. It’s unfortunate that we lost this in the transition to components.