Doing a ground up rewrite of our app at work. I made the call that the application needed to be semantically correct (well, mostly correct. We avoid div everywhere), have proper tab order, and be screen reader accessible. It takes more time but honestly it's not that difficult to do. Most people just.... Don't do it.
It doesn't end there. Even caring a bit for that makes a huge difference, I agree, and I appreciate the effort. The last time we had an accessibility audit, however, it was consisting of more than 200 problems with different priorities for an app with 70 something views. Our FE people were immediately up to the task of getting them fixed; a motivation I simply cannot expect from anyone who doesn't have a front-end focus. My basic checker reports in this simple comment-editor already a couple of problems.
It also doesn't end there. There's the UX part, re-usability (huge difference to have a cross-team front-end service-team), performance (not just initial load... Are the widgets you build with, say, Alpine.js tested for performance?), development speed, caching, offline-capabilities, opportunistic rendering, other best practices, branding, consistent design and interaction and so on. It's a science on its own.
Front-end is not just some basic thing which got a complex solution for no reason. It is a complicated task.
