The web is not yet 15 years old, so it’s pretty easy to take any couple of years during that period of time and just be stunned at the pace of development and innovation that you see before you. Not always uniform or especially well-considered, but the sheer speed and creativity at every point from day one until now is mind-boggling. Of course, saying so is pretty much a cliché at this point.
Accessibility on the web has always had a bit of an image problem. Being sensible at the cost of interesting. You could be one or the other and most people went with interesting. And even when it was taken seriously, it was always presented in the same way as accessibility is presented in the real world: As an add-on that sat on top of the original and ruined its lines. If you didn’t want to compromise on your main site experience, you would have to go to the trouble of creating a “text-only” version that you could divert disabled people (because who else needs special access?) towards.
That was then. And in between then and now things have definitely improved, but the feeling remains. That in properly addressing accessibility you have to compromise the user experience.