This is an example of "motivation"; a specific concrete use-case that actually came for the user to demonstrate that the issue is not merely theoretical.
> What would be the benefit of doing this beyond fixing your personal use case?
Other users might also have the same use case. Either the specific thing I'm trying to do, or just a need to generate <li> elements from headlines without auto-inserting <br> elements for any other purpose.
> Also, you can always use p > a CSS selector. What's wrong with that?
As a user, I would like to be able to apply a css selector to the elements in question
0. With extremely high confidence that I am selecting _only_ the specific <br> elements which org is auto-inserting in this case
1. Without having to do much understanding of the way org generates html exports, or much thinking in general.
It did turn out that in the case of my specific document (which was pretty simple), the selector `ul.org-ul li br` did in fact select only those elements. But was this guaranteed? Even for arbitrarily complex documents? Maybe, but proving this requires way more thinking than makes sense to me. Much easier to just tag those elements with a class. Especially since we already add classes like `.org-ul`.