This is absurd. Browsers offer many ways to scrape DOM content that are far more effective than using a screenreader. No doubt there are people who wish DOM content was harder to scrape, but "make screenreaders suck" would be completely ineffective for that, and accusing browser developers of deliberately doing it is slanderous.
Many of the screens people interested with prior to web 2.0 were much more flat in abstraction. You can simply look at early HTML to see how much simpler a document first format looks. The raw number of embedded div elements greatly complicates most screen reading.
Not really. It was certainly a way to do things. But it was less used than the current plethora of divs. Probably easier to understand programmatically, oddly.
