Yeah those devs using disabled as a catch all are delivering a poor experience and fundamentally there is a level of care knowledge missing for those who delivery that experience.

Although I’m still not sold on using aria-disabled. Remember your sending a message to screen reader users of “this element is disabled” when you use aria-disabled. The experience you are describing though is not the experience of something that is disabled, it is an experience of something that is active. Because on click your getting a response to that click action.

I like to compare ARIA to Fight Club.

The first rule of fight club is:
You do not talk about Fight Club.

The first rule of ARIA is:
You do not use aria, if a native element/attribute exists.

Actual first rule of aria: https://w3c.github.io/using-aria/#firstrule