Some thoughts on reasons above:

With recent display roles (like grid, flex, contents, etc.) the HTML needed exclusively for layout problems is really minimized if not completely nonexistent.

With `:has()` you can query "up" and "previous".

Some structure in your HTML is absolutely necessary, yes. But I'm not sure it is a problem. Data, content and states have structure.

Classes and attributes should be used for styling purposes, yes. Namespacing and linting can do most of the heavy work of keeping things tidy.