This is going to be unpopular here, but life became easier when I quit trying to write semantic HTML. It’s just poorly designed, I’m sorry. Every time I’ve reached for a <dl> I’ve eventually regretted it because I wanted multiple levels of wrappers, or a divider between sections, or an icon, or a heading spanning multiple key-value pairs, etc. They make this stuff with some flexibility but nowhere near enough to actually cover the generalized concept it purports to. I still use the corresponding elements when there are observable benefits, of course, like <button>, <h1>, etc, but when all it’s going to do is not quite fit the data model and force me to override everything, it’s just not a practical choice.

It shouldn’t be so controversial to say that if 99% of usage routes around your API, it’s probably the API’s fault.