This might be tangentially but as a 90's/2000's brat I've always been confounded by the old maxim, "HTML is for markup not presentation" and sure but if that was true why are there clearly a bunch of tags which don't meaningfully markup anything except to tell the browser to display the text some way? I'm thinking, "<i>", or, "<b>."

Your average person building a webpage early on wasn't concerned about markup. I've never met anyone that isn't a LaTeX user or software developer that cared about markup. We cared about how the page would look and how it behaved (how it was, "animated.") Fundamentally there's a lack of appreciation for, "web design as a painterly exercise" and that to me creates the crisis. The humane discipline of designing a webpage is in most respects divorced from the act of coding a website. It's fundamentally a question of ethics and aesthetics; of, "whys."