W3C validation column questionably useful
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Validators are certainly useful for finding potential issues with your code, but the number of errors a site gets does not tell you anything useful per se. This is because a site with many errors can still be completely fine, and even when the site is “valid”, that doesn’t mean much in practice. Validness just isn’t a “real” issue, like accessibility, performance, and security are.
You are 100 % right and my view on this is the same as yours. You can have a valid HTML document that has completely unsemantic markup.
But I do think, as you point out, that it can be useful, especially to find potential errors in your code base. So my general attitude is that developers should at least try to keep the errors to an absolute minimum. Sometimes this is also pretty easy to achieve, e.g. I found one news site that uses a doctype != HTML5 but uses HTML5 elements throughout the markup, so you could easily avoid hundreds of errors simply by using the correct doctype.
I’ll add a note in the "legend and metrics" section to point out that a valid page per se isn’t an indicator of a well-crafted website.
I added a note pointing to this issue. Thanks for your input!