"strong" is an intention and allows other things to define what style(s) that intention should be represented with.
It's not often that you want to represent something as a "bold" style without representing it as having strong emphasis, but there are times. A header is a good example of a place where you might want the header to be styled bold, but strongly emphasize a single word in the header. Since <header> doesn't apply the styles that - say - h1 does, it would be perfectly reasonable to script your header as
``` <header><b>The <strong>Worst</strong> Case Scenario</b></header> ```
... especially if you didn't want all of your headers to have a bold style applied.
Obviously there are a few other edge cases but I will admit that the vast majority of the times would naturally call for a strong tag, over a bold tag. And for those majority cases, I'm really glad that it's "strong" rather than bold, because "strong" is meaningful in different ways than "bold" and it always makes more sense, to me, reading it back as html telling me how I should interpret the word, rather than just how it should look.
Instead, I am complaining that we got to allocate a one-character tag to bold and then when we realized that we screwed that up we allocated a FIVE-character tag to strong. Hell: we hadn't even run out of one-character tags!! Why not <e>...</e> and <s>...</s>?! If you really think we needed to preserve the one-character tags, that we were given a two-character abbreviation for <em> but are forced to use a five-character word for <strong> is just insulting :(.
Incidentally, there's also "strike" and "del", which look the same in my UA style sheet. I think strike was "deprecated" at some point, but I probably added it because websites still use it.
Did you use ChatGPT to count the letters?
(Hell: it isn't even clear that I'm "advocating" for anything at all; at best it would be "don't bother with HTML/Markdown, as both ended up making poor choices for readability of your source document: instead, use a custom markup/markdown and then have code--on your server--to render it into the appropriate semantic HTML". Yet, while that is how my blog used to work, I actually failed to reallocate the tag names.)
I do, in fact, carefully use <strong> in my HTML documents (though I'm now starting to wonder if that's wrong, per the sister comment which linked us to the standard; it, surprisingly-to-me, does seem like I'm "supposed to be using" <i> in most, if not all, of the places I've been using <em>...), and I've been known to go to pretty extreme lengths to correctly support various accessibility technologies in my code, both on the web and native.
It simply makes me a bit angry, every time I see it, that someone decided to make such a common element <strong> instead of, say, <s>, which I believe is a reasonable position and has nothing to do with accessibility, as we could have named the new tag <powerful> and it would have worked the same and yet clearly that would have been even worse than <strong> ;P. We should get to separately judge--and even potentially lament one of--these two decisions.
(I'm thereby going to assert pretty directly that your decision to insult me by calling a narcissist is based on you not bothering to read what I wrote or pay attention to the actual thing I was complaining about--as I'd in fact have no reason to complain if I didn't care about the same thing you do: no one removed <b> from either the standard or the implementation--and just ran with a knee-jerk interpretation of some of the keywords I used.)
> The b element represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood, such as key words in a document abstract, product names in a review, actionable words in interactive text-driven software, or an article lede.
Same for <i>: that's not short for "italic" anymore, it's just a letter now, and is defined as:
> The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, transliteration, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts.
So go nuts: don't use <strong> or <em> if you semantically just needed <b> or <i>.
Doing this reminded me how angry I am that I am supposed to use "<strong>...</strong>" instead of "<b>...</b>". The verbosity overhead in a normal document of markup littered with five-character tags for something as basic as a keyword is sufficiently worse than one-character tags that it drives me to want to use something like Markdown (but then I am angered that it went with *...* and **...** instead of /.../ and *...* and I just start to give up on other peoples' tooling entirely).