A lot of us did and those worked perfectly with screen readers. It's not hard or even additional work, you just need to give a crap while doing basic design.

This is similar to the responsive/mobile design - if you care about it from the start, you'll structure the site/component in a way that it really won't take you much more time to support accessibility features. If you don't care at all, retrofitting accessibility will require severe refactoring and probably won't ever be done.

So not caring about it in "MVP" is about the worst thing you can do.

Not having something in the 'forefront' of one's mind isn't equivalent to "not caring".

You should also keep in mind that you're (implicitly) asking people to do more work – which is fine, but there are real costs and people aren't bad because they haven't already borne them.

No that is exactly my point - it's not "more work" if you think about it from the start. Just like it isn't more work to make a site responsive if you start correctly - but it's significantly more work when you have to rewrite a lot of components later because you didn't take accessibility (or responsiveness) in consideration at the start.

>it's not "more work" if you think about it from the start

Most of my job as a developer is thinking. So yes, it is more work. Accessibility / Responsiveness isn't always done first because it takes more time (either thinking or "working").