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From a WCAG point of view you might want the top one instead, some screen readers read content in in a different tone, which may not be intended.

Even then the equivalent of an em or i is a span, not a div.

is a semantic element, and doesn't necessarily have to be italic. There are lots of use cases for italic text outside of s.

Use if your use case is "alternate voice or mood" or "different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, transliteration, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts"

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-i-...

Shouldn't that be not <div>?

Using a framwork that generates html out of something else (XML but let's not get into the whys and whatfors) and I literally cannot use , or any other tag. I need to use a class and set the style in the CSS file.

Edge case? Maybe. Just don't dismiss something that doesn't immediately fit your own use-case.