One article on Smashing Magazine really stirred up the internet.
The author, Divya Manian, ambiguously presents a problem most web developers are facing: semantic markup is hard.

While I do employ as many new, semantic elements as I feel confident with, I know and see this is not the case with many, many web development studios. The reason, as Divya pointed out, is that good examples and tutorials are hard to come by.
I also pointed out that when someone sees these new elements put to good use, they feel intimidated. Like looking at Air Jordan play basketball.

So people drop the semantics and stick to their divs and spans, which are not that horrible, but are definitely not the future either.

The problem today really is that people learn by example and they are always in a hurry. If they cannot find something to copy, paste then hack to work, they move on to another solution that provides that comfort.

While Divya was only pointing out that going too deep down the semantic hole gets your users nowhere, people read that as "semantics are for sissies" and just went apeshit in the comments. And all over the internet.