This...does not match history.

There was never a golden era like you describe (it was a time of conflicting philosophies, people saying "eh, let's add this, that would be sweet", and browser vendors competing to add as much as possible to out "innovate" each other and the limited specs), semantic HTML helps in some cases but is never going to give you automatic accessibility, and a one size fits all browser style is still not going to give you what you need even as you add increasingly unsemantic tags to try to improve it (which is exactly what was happening pre-CSS).