Vent: A simple form label issue ate up my whole Friday

I was checking a signup form for a local non-profit's site, thinking it would be a quick pass. The visual labels looked fine, but my screen reader test kept skipping a required field. Turns out, the developer used a placeholder as the only label, which is a huge no-go for accessibility. What I thought was a 30-minute review turned into a 6-hour deep dive with the dev to trace the styling and rebuild the component properly. We had to redo the HTML structure and test with three different assistive tools. Has anyone else been blindsided by a seemingly small markup choice that caused a major time sink?