Well it actually wasn't my example. I copied it straight out of someone's template I just recently ran across where they were bragging about how "great" and "easy" it waas.

But yeah, Aria just makes it worse, reeking of "people can't be bothered to use the correct tags, so let's slop an attribute on there as something else for them to refuse to use properly"

The laugh being how many Aria roles actually say "when appropriate use the correct tag instead" which is why <form role="form"> is one of the most ignorant dumbass things one could possibly write.

The only time I ever thought an Aria role served a legitimate purpose was role="hidden" and that's because we had that before they gave us a proper "hidden" attribute.