I think 90% of the misuse arises from devs not realizing that they can use a <button> or <a> (or whatever else is correct in that context) and still style it however they want.
The other 10% is from people giving up unstyling buttons. If I remember correctly they need more than 10 lines of CSS to undo all kinds of weird specific CSS that <button> has. Maybe nowadays it can be done with `all: initial`
I just think that a form button is something that looks a specific way for a reason, and that styling shouldn't break fundamental expectations. But that's obviously a subjective opinion, people can style their pages however they like, I just don't personally like design that lies to me.
