Honestly the "old web" was also a hellscape for accessibility.

There's been a lot more advances for accessibility in the last 5 years because of ADA lawsuits being successful against large companies with websites, so it's seen as a liability.

In my personal experience in general this has been a big impetus for companies to start take WCAG seriously. However in practice a lot of this is box checking because it's expensive and complicated.

A lot of our newer contracts have had explicit terms for various levels of accessibility, but this has lead to a problem in the sense that accessibility is something that is designed, and in practice the company has a very hard time changing it's SDLC in most teams. So in effect the expectation from higher ups is that it's a magic wand, these kinds of top down initiatives fail because they're often just having people internally rewrite a11y tutorials or act as consultants to projects they know don't have the resources to actually become accessible.