When people say this, it feels like we're in different universes, or at least looking for different things.
I main Linux on all of my machines. Most of the native apps on it have terrible UX. Even big apps - On touch screens, Firefox doesn't support two-fingered scroll. Chrome won't snap to the side of a desktop. Neither will bring up a virtual keyboard if I click on the URL bar.
The majority of my native apps that I use don't support fractional scaling - apps like Unity3d are unusable on 13 inch screens and there's no way for me to zoom in or out on them. Even system dialogs suffer from this problem sometimes, it's like nobody on native ever learned what an 'em' unit is and they're still stuck in 1990 calculating pixel positions.
To contrast, most of the websites that I'm using, even when they're badly designed will work on smallish screens or can be individually zoomed in and out. My keyboard shortcuts work pretty much the same across every site (aside from the rare exception that tries to be all fancy and implement its own). If they break, it's not rare for me to be able to open up an inspector and add one or two CSS rules that fix the problem.
Reading Hacker News, I sometimes wonder if I'm just browsing/using entirely different sites/apps than everybody else is. I don't understand how my experience is so different.
Regarding semantic HTML, I generally don't have too much of a problem there either. I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites. If you're using React and it can't be used without spitting divs all over the place, maybe the solution is just to stop using React? Modern HTML is only going to look like div soup if you fill it with divs.
I mean, I can build you a horrible SQL database that requires 30 joins on every data call, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SQL is bad. It means that auto-generating SQL tables based on a bunch of cobbled-together frameworks and user-scripts is bad. Treat your application's DOM like you would a schema, and put some thought into it. That will also solve a great deal of the responsive design problems on mobile that people are talking about, because light DOM structures are more flexible than heavy ones.