hand it off to a front end person eventually

This is what's sad about the current situation in the industry: some things are being preferred not because it's better for quality and performance, but to reduce the friction in learning. So, if you're using a framework that everyone does, you'd expect your next hire/whoever is going to use it next to be familiar with it.

I don't want to give you a bad advice telling you to go against whatever the industry agreed upon. I am personally doing things the way I think is the best, without caring who is going to use it next, because usually there's no next. It's either my stuff or work I do for someone else who just wants things to work.

Yeah, I remember when semantics were not a thing, and people would do everything using tables, and when the Grid was introduced, I was a bit skeptical because I thought, while it is useful, it might not be compatible with most browsers used at the time. Today, though? Most of the people are on browsers that support flexbox, Grid, semantics (which is also important for accessibility), etc.