Honestly I'm just relieved that ChatGPT didn't suggest a div with role="button".
I have spent the last 5 years trying to get a good grasp of semantic and accessible HTML. It seems like every week I find out I was wrong about something I thought I knew. There's a bunch of blog posts out there with conflicting examples, and the only "official" source that's actually readable is the ARIA Practices Guide (APG). Which, by the way, starts off by telling you that "No ARIA is better than Bad ARIA" and recommends that you don’t use any of the code from the "Patterns" pages because reasons.
So to end my rant, I would say that on the one hand, I understand the author's frustration, but on the other, a11y in HTML is a nebulous maze of ARIA attributes and it isn't always clear which element is the "semantic" one for certain use cases.
I have spent the last 5 years trying to get a good grasp of semantic and accessible HTML. It seems like every week I find out I was wrong about something I thought I knew. There's a bunch of blog posts out there with conflicting examples, and the only "official" source that's actually readable is the ARIA Practices Guide (APG). Which, by the way, starts off by telling you that "No ARIA is better than Bad ARIA" and recommends that you don’t use any of the code from the "Patterns" pages because reasons.
So to end my rant, I would say that on the one hand, I understand the author's frustration, but on the other, a11y in HTML is a nebulous maze of ARIA attributes and it isn't always clear which element is the "semantic" one for certain use cases.