Presumably there's some natural semantic relationship between the elements if you're going for that kind of visual layout (and even blind users might benefit from encoding that relationship in the DOM), but I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point.

Sparingly-used non-semantic grouping elements only inserted when absolutely necessary is a pretty different story from the "layers and layers of wrapper elements" that the article mentions, though.

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> you need to modify HTML to modify the presentation in practice

If you're e.g. grouping together content that was previously unstructured, arguably that's a semantic change as well as a presentational one.