Your comparison to "alt" kind of shows what I'm talking about in terms of people not even understanding the existing attributes, so why add more? Alt is not "Just for screen readers" and exists for the purpose of graceful degradation.
Like when an image is blocked like people trying to save bandwidth on mobile, or an off-site hosted image's server goes down. (even on screen media) Ever see what happens when the image's request times out, or the src is 404?
Or so that image search has text to index that image with. That's why "alt" should describe what the image is of, not what it "does"
Thus why <a href="page/2"><img src="images/next.png" alt="next"></a>
Is rubbish... on three counts. The alt text doesn't describe the image's content, it's a presentational image in the markup, and never have anchors that don't have CDATA inside them. That last one NNGroup would rip you a new hole for... and lighthouse penalizes you for now!
As I said though:
1) It seems like half of ARIA doesn't need to exist because you just use the correct tag. role="form" to make a DIV a form is just stupid.
2) The other half is all like "switch" where there's no reason to need to convey that information. Nor for enhanced behaviors, not to make the wrong tag behave like the right one, and not for any usability or accessibility concern.
Thus ARIA in its entirety just contributes to the code bloat, deepening of the learning and build stack for no benefit, and kind of feels like an entire specification was made just to employ people in bullshit jobs. The type of white-collar "old boy" behavior I've never had any stomach for.
I have yet to see a scenario where it provided any purpose or benefit that couldn't either be handled by existing tags, or isn't now supplanted by newer attributes. Again the only one that actually did anything -- role="hidden" -- has been supplanted by the "hidden" attribute. Beyond that? I just don't see why ARIA even exists. It serves NO purpose.
Your statement about the 2000's also makes me think you weren't there. That or you never embraced HTML 4 Strict which was common enough a failure. Let's be fair, the number of people who truly embraced 4 strict and proper use of CSS probably barely pushes past the double digits -- just look at the number of tools and fools who spent a decade and a half vomited up "HTML 4 transitional" proudly proclaiming to the world that their skills were in transition from 1997 to 1998. And why so much of the HTML people vomit up today is the same monument to HTML 3.2 thinking.
There is NO reason for AUDIO or VIDEO tags to even exist. Along with EMBED and IFRAME these were all supposed to be replaced -- along with IMG in the defunct "HTML Next" -- by OBJECT.
OBJECT, where browser support could be enhanced with sandboxed plugins. OBJECT where you weren't at the whims of browser makers as to what media formats are supported. OBJECT where one tag handles all non-text media.
OBJECT, where Microshaft killed it with their own proprietary bullshit and non-specification defaults. OBJECT, where browser makers were too lazy to bother adding the sandboxing it was supposed to operate in from day one because "multithreaded programming is hard". OBJECT, where many of the things it was supposed to have are now in PICTURE and IFRAME, whilst its implementation languishes in late '90's ineptness. OBJECT, where the wuck-fitted mattress stain implementation led to the death of the very idea of media format plugins.
*SIGH* They were supposed to have a place, you can thank browser makers for being asshats about it. Well... at least one good thing came out of it, browser makers pulled their heads out of their asses EVENTUALLY and stopped bickering about file format support. THANKS GOOGLE! (not sarcasm. .webm -- and by extension .webp -- is possibly the best thing to happen on the web since HTML was created.)
And it's why I think we should have a "media" tag filled with "src" tags to replace AUDIO, VIDEO, IMAGE, ENBED, and PICTURE... instead of taking a piss on the complexity of the language with more tags we shouldn't even need.
This is actually the thing that made me highly resistant to HTML 5 at the start alongside the original HGROUP and lack of versioning. WhatWG needs an enema to flush out that "living document" stool.
I also keep having to remind myself of how different my path is from others. I have a "clarity of vision" that gets really frustrated in defense of the illogical, "it just is" or "because we say so" fake authority, and so forth. There's a reason I'm a thousand times more hostile on the subject of religion than I am front-end frameworks.
And I embrace my inner curmudgeon because if I didn't I'd either end up throwing down my tools and go do menial labor like some of the most brilliant developers I knew. They just couldn't deal with the white collar criminal bullshit and the endless stream of lies the corrupt, incompetent, and outright fraud developers treat as holy writ!
Or worse end up like my friends Dan, Aaron, and Ian all of whom's deaths were... very sus.
I mean one is found swinging from an electrical cord from a spot it was impossible to even reach, another just keeled over within 4 hours of being released from the hospital as "fine", and... well... the final was called a suicide even though he left messages worried he was going to face a "death by cop"
That was a rough year and a half.
Hell if it wasn't for my "don't let the bastards win" attitude I'd have been rotting in the ground for at least a decade an a half.
"And for me, that's enough
'cause this life's been tough
So it gives me a purpose I can rest in"
-- Ren