Hi there, thanks a lot. Glad that you liked the article. To be honest, I am also not an a11y expert, I mainly follow the rules the tool displays.

If I look at the docs from Mozilla they say the following for basic buttons.

“Buttons should always have an accessible name. For most buttons, this name will be the same as the text inside the button. In some cases, for example, buttons represented by icons, the accessible name may be provided from the aria-label or aria-labelledby attributes.”

I guess that in most cases the tags are not needed, but there may be some screen readers that can not handle it.