Sometimes I have a hunch that inaccessibility is what costs money. A basic informative HTML web page is cheap to write and host. The deluge of swirling graphics, icons, and microscopic pull-downs, are what cost money to create.
Oh, and ARIA rule one: don't use ARIA, use the native HTML equivalent. Rule two: Only use ARIA if you can't express your intent in native HTML and make sure you know what your code is doing, don't just copy paste some ARIA example from another project or random site, lots of ARIA in the wild is wrong.
I'm a blind developer and accessibility consultant. Accessibility consulting is a good business to have these days, but I hope my work will be obsolete one day :).
Sure, there's some things that work better as an SPA, but those are extremely rare.
Example: https://www.debian.org/ is a simple website, designed for broad accessibility, but it doesn't look 'slick'. If you were looking to choose an OS, this website wouldn't make you go 'wow'.
To me, a website is a tool to get something done. I don't want a website that "wows" me. If you really want to wow me, then you are likely trying to sell me something that I probably don't want.
Accessibility is about letting people get shit done, not marketing to them.
People say they don't want shitty news either, but the news that is most popular is pretty low quality, sensationalist tripe.
Webpages to me are tools, not marketing material. If you want to use them for marketing, then great! Just don't waste my time trying to turn a tool into marketing material.
Webpages that are meant to be useful (like Debian makes, etc) should be accessible, not promotional. The webpages I use are tools to get a job done, not to browse for advertisements.
You're completely missing my point. Web pages are the way they are because they pull eyeballs. You are a single data point. You don't like slick webpages? Fine, you're an outlier. There are people out there that don't go online at all. They're also an outlier. You each find niches to cater to you, but you're not the majority case, and if you're interested in eyeballs for whatever reason, then dealing with the majority case is in your interests.
It's not just marketing either. Compare Arch's wiki (simple Mediawiki) to Debian's. Mediawiki is more complex than Debian's simple pages, yet it is far more readable. Even as 'just a tool, not marketing'[1], this heavier webpage is a better webpage.
[1] marketing isn't just selling stuff. for example, plenty of free software projects provide giveaways to conferences to raise their profile