If you want to build for performance, accessibility, discoverability, or resilience, you must start with HTML that means something.

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Semantic HTML provides crucial structure that modern web development often overlooks in favor of component-based approaches and utility classes. Proper HTML semantics improve performance by reducing DOM complexity, enable better accessibility for assistive technologies, help search engines and AI agents understand content, and create more resilient applications. The shift toward meaningless div soup and utility-heavy markup creates performance bottlenecks through layout thrashing, increased rendering costs, and bloated stylesheets. Semantic elements like article, nav, and section provide natural boundaries that browsers can optimize, while also serving as a foundation for modern CSS features like containment and content-visibility.

Why Semantic HTML Still Matters

Semantic HTML is how machines understand meaning

It’s not just bad HTML – it’s meaningless markup

Agents are the new users – and they care about structure

No one is writing HTML anymore lil bro

I think the author’s intention was to portray that it is OK to write plane HTML.
And to be honest, I see a lot of overkill in some of today’s code.
Use the K.I.S.S. and make it maintainable will go a long way.