In practice today, that's fine. Typically authors have a hard time differentiating what "emphasis," "importance," and "bring attention to" mean to them. Therefore, nothing conveys a distinction by default.

The entire purpose of <b> was what it looked like. They changed its definition to not be about what it looked like but why an author might make it look that way, i.e. to bring attention to it. The representation flows from the motivation, there's no need to embed a look in the definition.