The move from table layouts to divs+css was based on the idea that mixing markup and layout/styling was bad. Then a few years later as everyone moved to React et al. it was good again.
I understand the sentiment, but disregarding the nuance does the situation a disservice. HTML/CSS serves two separate but related use cases: a document layout and display language, and as a display layer for applications. I remember Pete Hunt's talk "React: Rethinking best practices" [1] explaining in 2013 why the styling separation of concerns for document display doesn't make sense for applications. Has opinion on best practice se-sawed back and forth? No, we've merely gone from web content being document centered to being massively application centered, and the discourse on best practices follows that proportional shift.
Would it be better if there was a different web application display technology, not retrofitted on top of HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even separated from the success of Javascript, it's an archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to market success.
Yeah, a switch in mode between "make an XML document and then make something else to present it" (I think suffered massively from never actually being completely achievable with CSS, let alone comprehensible) and "just make a UI toolkit for javascript" (where in a full webapp world, the underlying documents are usually JSON and the presentation layer is javascript using HTML+CSS to talk to a layout and rendering engine).
Sigh.