Is it bad practice to use spans as buttons W3Schools is doing that

Question

Consider this modal example (and a lot of other examples from them)

They use a span tag, that acts as a close button for the modal. Isn't this semantically incorrect? Or is there some legitimisation to do that?

It is kind of weird that the "web standardization consortium" is putting out examples like that. But maybe I am missing something here

Answer 1

it wont become a bad practice if you add tabindex attribute  and a better prqactice is to add ARIA - attributes:

if you think that w3cis doing it you are wrong in that case W3Schools is a low-quality advert-ridden tutorial site that happens to have good SEO because they've been around forever.