Although there are some other uses for <p>, it is perfectly valid to use <p> tags for textual paragraphs and that has been the main use for <p> for as long as HTML has existed. I'm not sure why you believe otherwise.
I didn't say it's not a valid use, I said that it's not it's primary use.
Paragraphs relate to grouping content[1], not textual one. There's no logic in paragraphs.
I quote here the official spec, which makes various examples of how paragraphs are not related to logical paragraphs:
> The solution is to realize that a paragraph, in HTML terms, is not a logical concept, but a structural one. In the fantastic example above, there are actually five paragraphs as defined by this specification: one before the list, one for each bullet, and one after the list.
And I'll quote also the definition on MDN:
> The <p> HTML element represents a paragraph. Paragraphs are usually represented in visual media as blocks of text separated from adjacent blocks by blank lines and/or first-line indentation, but HTML paragraphs can be any structural grouping of related content, such as images or form fields.
Failing to realize that paragraphs are grouping rather than logical content leads to frequent misuses of paragraphs and this comment section is literally filled by bad paragraphs examples which suggests the community is largely ignorant on html.
In this comment section? Are you talking about stuff like the example I used earlier?
<p><div></div></p>
Yes, obviously this is bad and nonsensical HTML. Under no circumstances does it make sense to have a div inside a p. In fact, the above doesn't even work, being parsed as
<p></p><div></div></p>
But the intention of this example is not to show good HTML. The point is that many people have only a very basic understanding of HTML syntax, under the impression that
<foo><bar></bar></foo>
works for any elements, because there's a <foo> and a </foo> so clearly anything inside it must be inside the foo element, right? But this is not the case for all elements. HTML's syntax is more complicated than that. My example was only intended to correct this misconception, not to demonstrate semantically-correct HTML, and that goes for other similar examples made by other people in the comments too.
Take a look at the source code for http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Future.html for instance, which was written by the creator of HTML, Tim Berners-Lee.
You can also look at the source code for any page of the current HTML spec (e.g. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html) where, again, <p> is used for each paragraph in the text.