Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this trend, and is there any possible fix for end users other than begging application developers to have pity? :)

The reasoning is that too many developers and execs don’t give a flying fuck about accessibility features, and many will even outright balk at the suggestion of using time and money to develop them at the cost of “paying” features, and many developers don’t even know how to write accessible UIs. When I was a CTO I had the CEO berate me for wanting to pay more attention to accessibility; it would have cost money and since none of our customers actually requested accessibility features it would have been useless, according to them. Our incompetent fuck of a frontend dev also didn’t know the first thing about accessibility, and thought that learning about it would have been a waste of their time.

I’m somewhat visually impaired too, and on macOS I’ve just started using the “hover text” feature that you can find under “Zoom” in the accessibility settings, where if you hold down the option key you’ll see a popup that shows a text description of whatever UI element you’re pointing at (or eg. a description if it’s an icon button). Unfortunately it doesn’t work with all apps and all UI elements because, again, devs would need to put in some work too. In many cases I’ll just have to use the zoom feature to make sense of some smaller UI items.

I’m not sure there’s much to be done except to beg for pity, and based on my previous experience both using and producing apps, the likelihood of success is pretty slim. Always worth it to ask devs for accessibility features, but don’t get your hopes up.