As someone who was on the HTML5 Working Group ages ago... I can say from the view of someone who was there, this is not what happened. That group, primarily driven by Ian "Hixie" Hickson (who was a Google employee at the time... long story short, my view was that a lot of his job was to show up every day and say "Google just implemented this in Chrome, so now it's in the standard"), spent a massive amount of time trying to understand and codify how to get HTML to address important issues like accessibility, screen readers, etc. and transform HTML from being this mud mixing the dirt of display and the water of semantics and the pebbles of interactivity that it have been previously, and turn it into pure, clean water of semantics. And they mostly succeeded! It's nice to know that the endless emails about whether to keep <b> and <italic> were not wasted time!

I think your view of what happened in that period of time is incorrect, and I also think that a lot of the other comments you've made here don't agree with the historic context of the events.

We have been on a rapidly swinging cycle of paradigms for Web development since the mid 90's, and frankly every paradigm has been tried and hasn't been perfect. Even the paradigms of stuff adjacent to Web development, like project management and design, are spinning around the same circles for the last 30 years.

At what point do we just admit, "everything has it's benefits and problems, and you will pick what works best for you on your specific project" and stop thinking we know what's best for everyone else?

J.Ja