People have been using HTML tags non-semantically for a very long time and, to be honest, before HTML 4 you often didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.
Still, when I was getting back into web development in 2013 I became aware of an "I can just use <div> and <a> for everything, and then stick Bootstrap classes and event handlers on to get it to look and behave the way I want" attitude that had become pervasive amongst developers.
Now, to be fair, at the time this was legitimate: in 2013 older versions of Internet Explorer were still quite prevalent. They didn't support newer HTML5 constructs, or proper styling of certain elements. The <div>/<a> approach was often the only way to get things to look good, or even to look the same, across all browsers.
Those days are long since gone (for most of us, anyway[1]), but I wonder if the reason we continue to see this style of HTML is that we're still living in a sort of post-IE hangover period? Old habits die hard[2].
[1] I'm aware that even now not everybody has the luxury of pretending that IE doesn't, and never did, exist.
[2] Again, reminds me of the migration from earlier versions of HTML, where you'd really had to do things like use tables for layout and use various HTML elements for styling (with variable cross-browser support), to HTML 4, where you nominally didn't (except, of course, that not all browsers were created equal).