I'd say HTML for itself just gives us a way to give meaning or imply how something should be styled "headline of first order". In the end it's a markup language, not some magic styling tool.
How it is actually styled (in absence of CSS) is in the hands of the default rendering of your browser. That might very well be a very bad rendering, due to lack of knowledge/time/engagement of the people building/maintaining that renderer.
Also those renderes might come from a time and system where technical limitations where different, markup was different, lots of things were very different.
So I don't think we should expect HTML alone to "look nice" or work well in regards of readability.
> I'm quite certain that a large part of the web would need no CSS or just a few lines of it, if the basic (browser applied styles) were good. As in: designed
I think we would win a lot if browsers default styles were beautiful (as in: really good, not merely fancy) designed. Many websites then would need just a few lines to set some colors, style that weird-custom thing they do or make it feel just a bit more personal.
I think the bigger thing would be to have more semantic HTML. <dropdown>, <tab-area><tab>Content</tab></tab-area>, <carousel><slide>Content</slide></carousel>, <rich-text-editor>, etc. Instead we've got a million immature implementations of these that are slower because they are written in JS instead of native code, slowly break over time as they aren't maintained, and typically have terrible accessibility.
I'd say HTML for itself just gives us a way to give meaning or imply how something should be styled "headline of first order". In the end it's a markup language, not some magic styling tool.
How it is actually styled (in absence of CSS) is in the hands of the default rendering of your browser. That might very well be a very bad rendering, due to lack of knowledge/time/engagement of the people building/maintaining that renderer.
Also those renderes might come from a time and system where technical limitations where different, markup was different, lots of things were very different.
So I don't think we should expect HTML alone to "look nice" or work well in regards of readability.