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We have lists implemented like divs, navs like divs, lack of appropriate attributes, aria labels and few other things.I see content organized into sequential, distinct blocks of text which include multiple paragraphs— LI elements are block-level and can contain multiple paragraphs. There's no semantic problem here and no accessibility problem. In HTML5, for accessibility purposes, divs should be used for presentation only. They have no semantic meaning. Lists do.
> Articles speaks about optimizing for performance but [...]
Agreed, mostly.
> they will find fonts that will be great among the system fonts
Having sane fallbacks in your font stack is important, but that statement is false and is why developers don't make those decisions. That's fine— it's not your job— but even as a long-time developer I won't tell developers how to do their job if I'm serving in a design role on a project.
I was also as a culinary school trained chef. Many insist salt omitting salt and letting diners salt food themselves yields equivalent results. Obviously, health conditions should be accommodated for, but in most senses, they're provably wrong. We perceive most of "flavor" through our noses. Tongues sense few things but stimulating it focuses our brain on smell. Totally integrated seasoning drastically intensifies the overall flavor of food. Salt is also chemically and mechanically important in many processes, such as searing. I'd say 60% of professional polish in food comes from proper seasoning.
Design details are like seasoning. A famous designer said "the details are the design". Users don't consciously perceive those individual details but they have tremendous impact on a whole. Even people without experience, however could easily understand the difference between a title set in the 'Display' style of a Pro version of a font vs the standard paragraph version. Setting paragraphs type in the display version of a font makes it much less readable. The visual impact of properly tuned kerning pairs alone gives the pro version of a font a ton more polish. Even different versions of Helvetica have drastically different quality. Target, one of the most savvy businesses on the planet, developed their own version of Helvetica at tremendous expense. They didn't do that on a hunch— they had good reason to believe they'd recoup their expenses by doing so.