Great post! Both a "handout" for developers struggling with ARIA and a plea for sensible usage 🤝

Regarding:

I honestly think that this markup could be changed to a <button> because, at the time of this reading, I cannot use the link to go to the href attribute value (/settings) and acts like a button.

I think that's a Progressive Enhancement measure. If, for any reason some or all of the JS would not get loaded it would still function as a link to "/settings"