That is likely almost entirely because the people who make excuses for this chazerei don't actually give an actual flying purple fish about the end user or accessibility. Much less the purpose of HTML and why CSS shouldn't be in the markup in the first damned place unless -- as I said -- people want to shove their heads up Mr. Slave's backside back in 1997 so they can say hello to Mr. Lemmiwinks.

As evidenced by their utter ignorance of what media targets are, the idea of multiple device targeting. Aka why they use STYLE or rel="stylesheet" link without media="" on it or sending media="all" with style that is gibberish and/or a waste of bandwidth on anything other than screen.

As you said, they're undoing 20+ years of progress. And it really goes back to before that with the intent of 4 Strict and why CSS was created. Zeldman and Keith were just amongst the first vocal "names" in the industry to embrace it in a way anyone actually bothered listening.

Didn't hurt that by 2003 we were finally kicking Nyetscape 4 and IE 5 support to the curb, making the bleeding edge of 1998 development practices real-world deployable.

Since again, what's that "transitional" in HTML 4 Transitional mean? In transition from 1997 to 1998 practices.