That is, a dearth of them. Most of them are still there defining basically just text content.

> Including for changing just a piece of text (b, i, strong, em, and many more)

Not as many as you'd think. If I need to layout text in a certain way and mark some of it in a certain way, there's nothing better than <span>.

> But you have to stop thinking visually and start thinking semantically.

This sentence carries less meaning than you think it does.

E.g. there's the <article> tag. It was literally originally proposed for text content only: https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Using_HTML5_article_element The spec twists this to become more generic and encompassing all other content, and still does not escape framing it as mostly text-ish elements: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/sections.html#the-art...

And here's MDN intro saying "oh, yes, if you want cards for your product catalog, or an interactive widget, use <article>" https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Yup. "article" is "semantic" to represent cards in a product catalog.

You basically have to construct a parallel hierarchy of elements in your head with specific behaviours that doesn't match what element names mean, or used to mean.

There's nothing fun in figuring out 30 years of history of a largely outdated tech being twisted to conform to the new world of complex layouts and interactions.